The Pennsylvania English Final Rise-Fall: Intonation, Pragmatics, and Regional Variation

In contrast to the common final rising pattern of Mainstream English yes/no questions, these questions may be produced with a final rising then falling intonation in parts of Central and Western Pennsylvania (PA). Researchers have suggested that this pattern is pragmatically conditioned, used either when a particular response is expected, or when the speaker wishes to communicate the answer is not-at-issue. While previous work on this regional final rise-fall pattern has been limited to observations of spontaneous speech, this paper presents the results of a pair of production and perception experiments aimed at obtaining a more detailed characterization of its acoustic correlates and testing hypotheses regarding its pragmatic conditioning. The results replicate and extend previous findings, illustrating highly variable fluctuations in fundamental frequency across yes/no question tokens that share a final rise-fall pattern, and a tendency toward using this pattern to imply that the speaker already has some idea of what the answer to the question will be. Comparison of the perceptions of speakers from Central PA with speakers from outside the Midland Dialect region suggests that pragmatic knowledge of this intonational variant may be region-specific. The results are discussed in the context of recent work in which intonation is shown to be a marker of social group or region, providing an example where regional intonational variation appears to be shaped at least in part by pragmatic meaning.