Oliver Niebuhr / Julia Bergherr / Susanne Huth / Cassandra lill / Jessica Neuschulz

Intonationsfragen hinterfragt – Die Vielschichtigkeit der prosodischen Unterschiede zwischen Aussage- und Fragesätzen mit deklarativer Syntax

Declarative questions are defined as questions that are phonetically marked, rather than syntactically or lexically. They are conceptualized as being distinguished from statements by a rise in intonation at the end of the sentence. However, observations of spontaneous dialogue in which declarative utterances with terminal falling intonation are also employed and recognized as questions appear to contradict this concept. Against this backdrop, our study subjects this type of declarative question, the core function of which is to pose ancillary requests (Nachfragen), to a detailed phonetic analysis, based on carefully elicited monologues and dialogues and including both matter-of-fact and emphatic styles of speech. The results show that the elicited requests differ globally from comparable statements – the direction of the terminal intonation movement aside – in being realized more rapidly and breathy, with less prenuclear accents and with an initially deeper and levelled intonation. However, these multiparametric phonetic differences had no absolute validity, but rather applied only between comparably matter-of-fact or emphatic statements and questions, thus emphasizing the importance of a context-dependent interpretation of phonetic patterns. Even in the absence of perceptual experiments, the concept of the form taken by the declarative question must thus be seen as inadequate, in terms of both its intonational and positional (sentence-terminal) specification.

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