In
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the
syntactic form of a
declarative but the rising
intonation typically associated with
polar interrogatives.
# ''Rising declarative:'' Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me?
# ''Falling declarative:'' Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me.
# ''Polar question'': Does Justin Bieber want to hang out with me?
This feature exists, for example, in English and Russian.
Research on rising declaratives has suggested that they fall into two categories, ''assertive rising declaratives'' and ''inquisitive rising declaratives''. These categories are distinguished both by the particulars of their pitch contours and their conventional discourse effects. However, the distinction in pitch contour is not categorical, varying between speakers and overridable by context.
Assertive rising declaratives are characterized phonologically by a high pitch accent which rises to a high boundary tone, notated as H* H-H% in the
ToBI system. Assertive rising declaratives are assertion-like in that they provide the addressee with information. However, they also convey that the speaker is uncertain about some aspect of how their utterance fits in the discourse. For instance, in the following example, B is understood as effectively asserting that they do indeed speak
Ladino while conveying uncertainty about whether speaking Ladino counts as speaking Spanish.
# A: Do you speak Spanish?
B: I speak Ladino?
Inquisitive rising declaratives are characterized phonologically by a low pitch accent which rises to a high boundary tone, or L* H-H% in the
ToBI system. Their discourse effects are similar to biased
question
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interroga ...
s in that they seek information from the addressee while conveying that the speaker already have certain expectations. For instance, in the following example, B conveys incredulity at the notion that John has a sister and invites A to confirm it.
# A: John went to pick up his sister.
B: John has a sister??
There is no consensus on how rising declaratives come to have their observed discourse effects. Different researchers come to different conclusions about whether the two kinds of rising declaratives have the same semantic content, and some analyses cover only one or the other category.
In work such as Jeong (2018), the two kinds of utterances are treated as having different semantic content, assertive rising declaratives having bona fide declarative denotations and inquisitive rising declaratives having bona fide interrogative denotations. In such accounts, their respective discourse effects arise from the interaction between these denotations and
pragmatic reasoning or conventions of use.
However, other work has proposed unified accounts. For instance, Westera (2013) argues that rising intonation conveys that the speaker isn't sure whether their utterance is in accordance with
Gricean Maxims
In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutual ...
. On this account, all rising declaratives have the same semantic content but end up with different discourse effects depending on which maxim the speaker worries they are violating. In the assertive example above, the maxim would be the
Maxim of Relevance. In the inquisitive case above, it would be the
Maxim of Quality.
See also
*
Conversational scoreboard In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors.
Mo ...
*
Intonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For exa ...
*
Speech act
*
Tag question
*
Uptalk
The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI) is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes-or-no questions ...
Notes
Semantics
Pragmatics
Prosody (linguistics)
Types of question
Formal semantics (natural language)
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