aturday, 26 August 2017

Uptalk?
One of comedian Adam Hill�s better-known skits is about the way it sounds like
every sentence an Australian says sounds like they are asking a question �
apparently, they have so little confidence in themselves, that they have to hedge
their bets. You can see a clip here.

However, as funny as this observation is, is this really why people tend to use a
higher pitch at the end of a sentence? This is just one question that Erez Levon
decided to find out.

Known as High Rising Terminals, or HRTs, this rise in intonation that occurs at the
end of phrases is well-documented across various dialects of English, including the
aforementioned Australian English, as well as in Canada and the US. It is used to
perform multiple functions in the discourse, including showing that the speaker has
not yet finished their turn, and marking in-group solidarity. However, there has
been considerably less documentation on its pragmatic function in UK dialects.

Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, Levon looked at recordings

from forty-two of his undergraduate students, to see how often this feature was
used, and in what contexts. The students were asked to do twenty to thirty minutes
of recordings in small groups � some of which were mixed sex, some of which were
not. The recordings were then transcribed, and the instances of HRT annotated and
then coded by speaker.

There was a huge variation in how many HRTs participants used; some only used the
feature as few as 64 times, some as many as 317. Across over 7,000 instances of
HRTs, Levon found some interesting patterns. For one, contrary to stereotypes,
everyone in the group used HRT, regardless of gender. While the usage rates ranged
from 3.5% of phrases up to 41.2%, there was no one who never or always used it.
Furthermore, whilst women regularly used them regardless of the gender composition
of the group, men used them considerably more in mixed-sex settings. In fact, men
used them more even than the women did in these groups � something that may
surprise those who associate it with female speech.

Men and women were also significantly more likely to use the feature in the context
of describing something or recounting a narrative when in these groups, as opposed
to giving a fact or opinion. They were also both far more likely to use HRT on
information that was new to a conversation, rather than going over something that
was already a given.