Sentence Types and Intonation

Le point de départ de cette recherche est l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’irlandais pourrait exercer une influence sur l’anglais d’Irlande au niveau intonatif. Trois types de phrases (déclaratives, WH-Questions et Yes-No Questions) sont étudiés sur la base du corpus PAC-Galway : 33 locuteurs provenant de deux endroits, Galway et des Gaeltachtaí (zones irlandophones), et ayant une utilisation variable de l’irlandais. Trois contours récurrents émergent des données : H*L % (chute simple), H* L % (chute tardive) et L* % (ton statique bas), tous trois appartenant à la catégorie des chutes. Cependant, les trois contours sont répartis parmi les trois types de phrases, ce résultat soulevant la question du statut phonétique ou phonologique de ces contours. Les variables de localisation et de la pratique de la langue irlandaise ont donc été testées, mais l’hypothèse de l’influence de l’irlandais sur l’intonation anglaise n’a pas été confirmée. Le genre et l’âge ont ensuite été pris en considération, montrant que ce dernier paramètre semble exercer une influence sur la réalisation des différents contours descendants, et plaidant pour le statut phonétique de ces contours.

The melodic structure of an interrogative utterance frequently depends on the grammatical structure of the sentence in question. In addition to the enunciative sentence of the kindvous venez?which bears a particular acoustic mark of interrogation, a rise in fundamental frequency in sentence-final position, there exist also interrogative utterances signalled by inversion of word order and still others marked by lexical means, the WH-questions. It is the intonation of this latter type of sentence which we intend to examine in the Canadian-French spoken in Ontario.The intonation of interrogative sentences has for some years been the object of important research in different languages. Wells (1945) and Trager and Smith (1951) note in English an intonation curve at the following levels: 2 - 3 - 1 - without any tonal prominence on the interrogative word. Armstrong and Ward (1926), Jones (1932) and Faure (1948) also find that this type of interrogative sentence has a descending intonation. Fries (1964) finds no specific intonation pattern in a spontaneous corpus from which he studiedyes-noquestions. For German, Von Essen (1956) notes two intonation patterns: one rising (question intonation) and one falling (interrogative intonation).

Korean wh-questions and yes-no questions have morphologically the same structure. In speech, however, two types of questions are distinguished by prosodic difference. In this study, we examined if Korean native speakers can distinguish wh-question and yes-no questions produced by Chinese Korean leaners based on the prosodic information contained in the sentences. For this purpose, we performed perception analysis, and 15 Korean native speakers participated in the perception test. The results show that two types of interrogative sentences produced by Chinese Korean leaners were not distinguished by constant pitch contours. These results reveal that Chinese Korean leaners cannot match prosodic meaning and prosodic form. The most saliant prosodic feature used perceptually by native speakers to discriminate two types of interrogative sentences is pitch difference between the F0 pick of wh-word and boundary tone.

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child’s sentence final particle (SFP) “ba”, in which we focused on the intention of this word and concluding with the core pragmatic meaning and divided the different levels of “ba”. In this way, we combined the different sentence types, the intentions of utterance, and the degrees of “undetermined intention” and researched on the pragmatic function of child’s SFP “ba” in order to obtain the pragmatic acquisition of “ba” at the specific development period (1;12-4;01). The acquisition and development of children's language is the result of a combination of biological factors, discourse input, and cognitive ability. Finally, the enlightenment of the research conclusions on early childhood education are pointed out.

This paper emphasizes the importance of regular questions in question classification, analyzes and summarizes four types of interrogative sentences and their corresponding pragmatic functions. On this basis, we have manually annotated interrogative sentences in selected novels and BaiduQA and have created an interrogative sentences corpus. A formal feature set for question classification is constructed based on corpus, and classification experiments based on rules and statistics are conducted respectively to check the classification effect of each feature. The set of feature rules is formed by optimizing feature combinations iteratively through multiple rounds of experiments, which provides a formal classification basis for the existing Question-answering systems. Through the comparison of various classification models, it is found that the method of finite state automaton can achieve a macro average F1-score of 0.94, whereas the random forest model achieving a macro average F1-score of 0.98, has better performance in classification.

In teacher-fronted kindergarten classrooms, questions are an efficient strategy to attract students' attention and guide them through a lesson. However, few studies have examined the related issues by taking co-speech hand gestures into consideration. By annotating and analyzing a videotaped lesson in a Chinese public kindergarten, the present study intends to solve the following problems: (1) What types of questions are posed by the teacher? (2) What types of hand gestures co-occur with these questions and how do gestures contribute to them? (3) What are the patterns of question-initiated sequences and how do the co-occurring hand gestures function? Three types of Mandarin questions (yes-no questions, specific/content questions and positive–negative questions) and a variety of sequence patterns are seen to recur in the selected class. Meanwhile, hand gestures function in multiple ways: (1) signifying, visualizing and reproducing a propositional content (i.e. referential function), and (2) indicating an off-propositional aspect of a question, an answer or a comment (i.e. pragmatic function). This study demonstrates that analyzing extra-speech modes, and especially co-speech hand gestures, is worth both the academic efforts of linguists and practitioners of early childhood education.

This paper deals with the controversial connection between sentence type and illocutionary force. I focus on wh-configurations of the form How cool is that! and demonstrate that this recent phenomenon presents some interesting challenges to approaches that are concerned with the illocutionary potential of sentence forms. In particular, the exclamation component of How cool is that! cannot be derived from features of exclamative syntax, but rather is a cumulative effect of exclamative intonation, the respective adjective, and the degree reading of how. However, the V-to-C-movement property results in a special pragmatics that proper exclamatives (i.e., without V-to-C movement: How cool that is!) lack. I claim that How cool is that! asks for affirmation or objection on the part of the addressee, and that this addressee-oriented component is signaled by a dedicated class of modal particles in the German version(s) of How cool is that! To analyze these addressee-oriented exclamations (A-EXCs), I adopt a syntactic approach to the connection between sentence types and their potential illocutionary uses and thus argue that this connection is by no means arbitrary and unrestricted. I show that both the special pragmatic function of How cool is that! and the corresponding distribution of modal particles in the German counterparts can be accounted for by referring to a compositional conception of sentence-type meanings, and I hence disagree with recent approaches that deal with How cool is that! and its counterparts in German as constructions (i.e., arbitrary form-function mappings) only.

The objectives of this research are to find out the types of English interrogative sentences and to explore the subtitling strategies used in translating English interrogative sentences into Indonesian subtitles in the Animal Kingdom movie. This research used a descriptive qualitative method. The data source of this research was a movie entitled Animal Kingdom meanwhile, the data of this research were the English interrogative sentences and the Indonesian subtitle of the English interrogative sentences. The results showed that there are five out of six types of English interrogative sentences identified in Animal Kingdom movie. There are 37 data of yes-no question, 73 data of WH-question, 120 data of declarative question, 1 data of tag question, and 4 data of rhetorical question. There are seven out of ten subtitling strategies found in Animal Kingdom movie, there were 9 data of expansion, 74 data of paraphrase, 78 data of transfer, 10 data imitation, 47 data of condensation, 10 data of decimation, and 7 data of resignation. It can be concluded that the most dominant subtitling strategy for translating English interrogative sentences into Indonesian subtitles in Animal Kingdom movie is transfer with the amount of 78 out of 235 data.

The present study analyzes the types of interrogative, such as yes/no questions, wh-questions, or alternative questions, and their semantic and pragmatic functions in a multilingual parallel corpus of spoken monologues extracted from the TED Talks transcripts in five languages: English, European Portuguese, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, and Hebrew. The corpus was developed with English as the pivot language, and the examples are aligned in all five languages based on the occurrence of an interrogative. To conduct this study, we designed an annotation scheme that harmonizes two parts of ISO 24617 – Part 8: Semantic relations and Part 2: Dialogue acts. This framework enabled us to determine the discourse relations that questions establish with the segments to which they are connected and that precede them and their communicative function. In our analysis, we observed that, despite the monologic nature of the corpus, interrogatives are very frequent and diversified across the five languages. Our findings also reveal that the questions are mostly used with a pragmatic function and that the range of discourse relations is less varied. Additionally, the analysis disclosed some pertinent differences between the five languages concerning the translation choices.

This paper focuses on rising contours in English read speech. Our hypothesis is that they are very few in this particular speech style. This is confirmed by quantitative and qualitative analyses, conducted on a corpus of read speech by native English speakers with a standard British English accent. The main result of the quantitative analyses is that out of 1076 tone units, 82% (whether final or not) are uttered with a falling contour, which is much more than could be expected. The qualitative analyses consisted in a thorough examination of the intonation contours in relation with the syntactic characteristics of our data, as well as an analysis of the pragmatic functions of the contours. They allow us to revisit the generally accepted idea that falling contours are associated with final statements and rises with yes-no questions and continuation. We show that the tonal sequence fall plus fall is by far the most common in read speech, whatever the syntactic structure, except for enumerations. Contrary to what is stated in the literature, the main function of rising contours is not to indicate non-finality and continuation, but rather to convey attitudes, at least in read speech.

The article analyzes the speeches delivered by the British Prince Harry at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Invictus Games and proves their inspirational nature. Inspirational speeches are defined as a public speech aimed, as a rule, at a group of people in order to convey a strong sense of enthusiasm, to inspire and motivate them, to encourage them to take desired actions. As a result of the lexicographic analysis, the framework of the concept of to inspire was formed, the semantics of which is filled with the following semes: to encourage someone to actions, to give desire and inspiration, to fill with enthusiasm, to excite liveliness and endurance, to motivate for changes for the better, to add confidence and strength. The participants of the communicative act triad are determined: the sender – the text – the addressee/ recipient, and their roles are outlined. The sender is proved to achieve a pragmatic effect by means of the text, i.e. inspirational speeches, exerting a speech influence on the recipient. The functions of the researched speeches are formulated, which coincide with the functions of communication – informative, social, expressive, pragmatic, and interpretive. Examples are employed to illustrate the secondary nature of informative and interpretive functions and the vividness of social, expressive and pragmatic functions. Due to the presence of the inspiration pragmatics in the basis of all communicative attitudes of the researched speeches the inspirational function is singled out, which is dominant.

This study analyzes the use of standard and non-standard language in culinary content on YouTube, focusing on their roles and functions in digital communication. The rapid development of digital technology has transformed communication patterns, with platforms like YouTube becoming primary spaces for interaction, especially in popular genres such as culinary content where creators often blend language styles. The hypothesis suggests that non-standard language is more dominant as it effectively builds audience engagement, while standard language ensures clarity and professionalism. A descriptive qualitative method with observation and note-taking was applied by analyzing a culinary video from Ria SW’s channel, specifically the episode titled “Medan Food Diaries: My Top 6 Picks”. Data was collected through meticulous transcription and analyzed using content analysis to classify language variations and their pragmatic functions. The findings reveal that non-standard language predominates in creating a casual and persuasive atmosphere, while standard language serves to deliver clear information. Standard language is strategically employed to convey factual details about food, such as ingredients or objective taste descriptions, to maintain credibility. In contrast, non-standard forms, including popular slang like “mantul” and other expressive phrases, are instrumental in fostering closeness and authenticity, making the content more relatable. The study concludes that both language varieties complement each other; standard language maintains the informative quality, while non-standard language enhances the entertainment value and viewer connection. These findings provide valuable implications for sociolinguistic studies and Indonesian language learning through digital media, demonstrating how language flexibly adapts to modern communication needs.

The Internet provides a space for network users to communicate freely. The desire of network users to express their thoughts, imagination and self-knowledge is reflected in the slang on the Internet and social networks. The language of the Internet appeared as a product of the network, formed its own characteristics in the process of use and acquired its own pragmatic function. These qualities have made it an important tool of modern communication and a cultural carrier.The pragmatic approach to the recipient of information is an important function of any language communication. Although the root of Chinese Internet slang comes from Chinese, it gives a completely different meaning and character as a network language than literal, which requires a pragmatic study to understand. From the point of view of the speaker and the listener, people's speech actions are considered as social behavior governed by various social conditions. It is aimed at explaining that the use of special words in a particular environment can determine the meaning of the text, affect all aspects, and thus determine the pragmatic rules. Before using a slang word, any network user should pay attention to its meaning, as it can also have a negative connotation.

Issues related to the semantics, structure and functions of new super-word linguistic units that have come into active use during the coronavirus pandemic are considered. Particular attention is paid to the statistics of searching the Internet for a certain phrase for a month and specific digital indicators of its existence as a stable one. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that identifies phraseologisms of the late XX — early XXI centuries, which need a full-fledged phraseographic description (origin, semantics, examples of use). Phrasemes are combined by the authors into thematic groups: 1) remote work and study, 2) administrative measures to combat coronavirus, 3) features of a new disease and its treatment. It is shown that in the texts of mass communication Phrasemes perform nominative, communicative and pragmatic functions. Investigating stable turnovers, the authors dwell upon their structure, which is represented by three models. It is noted that the result of the work will be a dictionary of phraseological neologisms, which, along with others, will include units that appeared during the coronavirus pandemic.

This study investigates the impact of health warnings on cigarette packages in the UK. The common health warnings, their specific communicative functions and their effectiveness in influencing consumer behaviour and perception remain underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by employing a qualitative multimodal social semiotic analysis to understand how textual and pictorial warnings function to communicate health-related messages effectively. The theoretical frameworks guiding this analysis are Kress's approach (2010) Multimodal Social Semiotic and Forceville’s model (2020) of Visual and Multimodal Communication. Methodologically, the study focuses on a purposive sample of seven UK cigarette packages, analysing the warnings for their semiotic effectiveness and pragmatic functions. The study reveals effective health warnings on UK cigarette packages that integrate textual, visual, and design elements. The findings also highlight the importance of cognitive relevance, showing that warnings which balance cognitive effort with substantial rewards—like emotional impact—more effectively influence behaviour change. The study suggests that more effective health warnings on cigarette packages should use a strategic integration of text, imagery, and design. It also recommends regular updates to warning designs based on ongoing audience research and enhanced public engagement in the design process to ensure that warnings remain relevant and impactful.