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Re: Re: Re: Vocal fry
| quote: | Originally posted by Vector A
Uptalk already has a meaning in other English dialects? It is used to mark a sentence that is supposed to be a question? So when people use it all the time it can be kind of annoying if you are not accustomed to it? Sort of like if someone were to put a question mark at the end of every sentence regardless of whether the sentence were a question? So it seems to me what is actually happening is the de-phonemizing of uptalk by Californians?
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It was hellishly hard not to read all sentences as questions. But I wouldn't say that's exactly what's going on, though I can see why people have this impression.
English doesn't rely exclusively on prosody (sentence intonation) to make questions: Word order also changes and sometimes there's the addition of specific particles (such as "do"). And, even when it does, it seems to me that the intonation doesn't rise as it does with uptalk. When you ask something, you rise until you reach the syllable before the last, when the intonation drops (unless you're surprised).
The phenomenon is actually understandable - it's not unlike back-channelling, in the sense that you make a question-like intonation in order to check if the hearer is engaged in the conversation with you.
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