On only-pragmatically driven intonation change
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0011/000426Keywords:
intonation phonology, intonation change, discourse completion task, postlexical meanings, phonetic convergenceAbstract
The intonation system of the Italian variety of Pescara was documented, revealing that two distinct sentence types—neutral polar questions and contrastive focus statements—historically exhibited the same two pitch accents as allophonic variants among older speakers. However, looking at the younger generation, the structural variations of these two sentence types demonstrate diverging evolutionary paths: both phonetic variants remain distinct and actively used for contrastive focus, whereas they largely fuse into a single "midway" pattern when utilized for polar questions. Because the phonetic forms of the patterns were originally identical across both sentence types, this developmental asymmetry can only be ascribed to pragmatic factors. This development suggests that polar questions are inherently more susceptible to phonetic convergence than contrastive statements.
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