Why do all languages share the same intonation for questions?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 76 points – 1 months ago

I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that a common aspect amongst all languages is the tendency to raise the pitch of your voice slightly when asking a question. Especially at the end of a question sentence.

If I'm wrong about this raised pitch being common amongst all languages, at the very least do all languages change their tone slightly to indicate that a question is being asked?

I guess there needs to be some way to indicate what is and isn't a question. Perhaps a higher pitched voice reflects uncertainty. Is this something deep rooted in humans, or just an arbitrary choice when language developed?

English doesn't even go up at the end of sentences for all questions, just yes or no ones.

Good catch - WH-questions tend to have a pitch drop instead.

Now thinking, Portuguese and Italian seem to follow the same pattern as English.

Same for German.

Do you really think thats true?

Do you really think thats true?

"Rhetorical" questions - like this one - are specially interesting because, while they follow the syntax of a genuine question, they're pragmatically assertions. You're implying "this is not true", even if you're phrasing it as a question.

And that phrasal pitch contour that you see in yes/no questions is dictated by the pragmatical purpose of the utterance, so if the "question" is not actually a question, it doesn't get it.

Can you tell me more?

more [with a higher pitch]

Yes, I can. /me leaves the room

Serious now, this sentence is a great example because, even if phrased as a yes/no question, you'll typically see it being used as a request - "please tell me more". And as such you'll often hear it without the higher pitch associated with yes/no questions.

I read this as you emphasizing true, not pitching up.

need that exponent formatting on lemmy

Hmmm...^this?^

Sorry; maybe try again and think of some other cases?

You sure about that?

I love you guys

Could you give some specific examples of questions in English that would not be asked with a rising tone at the end?

What's your name? How old are you? Where are you from?

They seem to have a rise-drop, at least when I say them.

"How old are you?" is interesting because the rise is on the third-last word ("old"). But "How old is your daughter?" has the rise in the first syllable of daughter.

That's just emphasis. You can tell because you can shift it to another word.

What's your name? (more pointed)
How old are you? (as if it's now suddenly of concern)
Where are you from? (maybe the person has an unusual accent)
Where are you from? (more pointed)
How old is your daughter? (shifting from discussing someone else's daughter)

Switching the emphasis on one word can completely change the meaning of a phrase, there's one example I love: "I never said she stole his money"

I never said she stole his money (someone else did)
I never said she stole his money (absolutely not true)
I never said she stole his money (I wrote it down)
I never said she stole his money (it was someone else)
I never said she stole his money (she might have just borrowed it)
I never said she stole his money (it was someone else's)
I never said she stole his money (she stole something else)

I wonder if it's more because we frame the question by altering the structure to indicate the appropriate response.

We could just as well ask "you are from where?" Or "your name is what?" That matches the expected sentence structure of a response, and the natural pitch rises.

But the default stress towards the end of the question is what makes it a question.

You can move the stress to another word for emphasis on yes-no questions, too, similarly removing the "rising intonation" that makes a question.

E.g., "Do you want any cheese^?" vs. "Do you WANT any cheese?" (Falling intonation after "want")

I'm totally with you. I think it is somewhat speaker dependent, but that is how I would say those questions.

What's your NAme

How OLD (are you)?

Where are you FROm?

You would never say

"What's YOUR name?

"How old are YOU?"

"Where ARE you from?"

The first two have emphasis that imply something different than a simple question. Like you are asking a bunch of people individually, and you are directing each question at a specific person.

The last one would maybe be like, if the person did something weird, and you were sarcastically asking where the are from, to imply that they were raised by wolves, or something like that.

Point being, yes, you can ask like that, but it has different connotations than a simple question, which I think is where you would use the rising intonation.

Do you really pronounce those with a higher pitch? Or do you pronounce them louder?

EDIT: that is a genuine question given that a lot of people conflate stress (louder; more dB) with pitch (higher tone; more Hz), and the examples provided hint prosodic stress, not prosodic intonation, since in English prosodic stress is often used for emphasis.

This clip has Arnold asking questions without the rising tone while the kids mostly use the rising tone.

"Who is my daddy and what does he do?" actually seems to drop a little bit.

I guess in this example, "who is your daddy?" Is the main question, which has a somewhat flat intonation, but contrasted to the emphasis in the second half of the sentence, it feels like a rise

So the pets recognize it and respond.

Russian does, because the rising intonation is the only thing that differentiates a statement from a question in many cases. Eg "You a good driver." Vs "You a good driver?" Both are grammatically correct, and only the intonation makes it a question.

Vietnamese doesn't really rise at the end of the question unless that's the way the last word is anyway. Some questions end with a low sound. Some questions are evident by a small word cluster (sounds like "Fai La") after the subject but before the object that basically mean "this is a question and not a statement." Or "I'm asking not telling"

They don't.

The general pattern seems cross-linguistically consistent.

It's not even consistent in English.

Yeah - I noticed it after reading your other comment. Fair point.

Coupling it with info from the Mandarin article that I've linked, it seems to apply to declarative (yes-no) questions only.

I was expecting Mandarin to be an exception, since the language uses pitch to encode different words; apparently it isn't, the speakers simply "abstract" the phonemic vs. phrasal pitch variations as two different things, when interpreting the sentence. Check figure 6.

And while there is a particle overtly conveying "this is a question", ⟨吗⟩ /ma⁰/ (the "0" indicates neutral tone), it seems that you can couple it with an assertive phrasal pitch to convey rhetorical questions. And other languages (like e.g. German and English, that overtly mark questions with verb fronting) show a similar pattern.

I also found some literature claiming that it might be cross-linguistically consistent

The most important observations are the following:

pitch tends to decline from the beginning of an IP [intonational phrase] to the end, a tendency known as declination;

the beginning of an IP may be marked by a local sharp rise in pitch or “reset”;

in IPs that are utterance-final and/or in statements, there may be a local drop in pitch at the end of the IP in addition to any overall declination spanning the IP as a whole;

in IPs that are in questions and/or are not utterance-final, declination may be moderated, suspended or even reversed, i.e. the overall trend may be less steeply declining, level, or even slightly rising;

in addition to exhibiting reduced declination, non-final and interrogative IPs may also have a local rise in pitch at the end, or at least have no local drop.

The validity of these observations, as general tendencies, is not in doubt.

The article also lays out some potential explanations for this. The basic gist of it is, nobody knows why but everyone has a guess.

EDIT: as another user (ABCDE) correctly pointed out, keep in mind that this works differently for open-ended vs. yes/no questions.

Thanks for providing these studies; that's all quite fascinating

Thanks !

Um Chinese may want to have a word with you

Vietnamese doesn't. The rising tone that you hear at the end of an English language question can change the literal meaning of a word in Vietnamese.

How does Vietnamese indicate when a question is being asked?

They append the word "no" to the statement.

"How are you?" Is "you're good, no?" But the word "no" does not have a rising tone.

Tonal languages are hard for non-tonal language speakers to pick up because of this. On the flip side, it can be tough for tonal language speakers to grasp the tonal inflections in English, and sometimes speak like robots before they understand how to use them.

There are languages that use words or particles of words to indicate a question, for example Turkish and chinese languages.

As I checked from an article, at least in Mandarin the usage of particles happens alongside the change in intonation, not at the expense of it.

Also note that even [some? all?] Germanic languages show something similar - but instead of a particle, you get a syntactical movement (verb fronting) overtly marking the question. Examples:

English	German
This is an apple.	Das ist ein Apfel.

Is this an apple? | Ist das ein Apfel? The cat meows. | Die Katze miaut. Does the cat meow? | Miaut die Katze?

In English this is slightly obscured by do-support being obligatory for most verbs, but note how it's the same process - if you were to insert the "do" without a question, in the third sentence, it would end as "the cat does meow".

Semi-related question since people have shown counterexample for OP's question: Are there English sentences where the tone goes up at the end, but is not a question? It feels like that particular tone is exclusive for questions.

Anything spoken by a valley girl

That's a sexist stereotype, but it's true for anyone feeling really unsure about their statement. You don't even have to change the note at the end of the sentence. Could just trail off... or add a whole new half sentence like "thoughts? "

Go watch some Karen Puzzles videos

Whatever that is, sounds like it might be toxic, typing it into my ancient-ass tablet broke everything and now the browser will only load the wiki page on neoliberalism

Edit finally it fucking worked and its just a nice lady with extreme vocal fry talking about puzzles, so wtf

Yeah she's great? but notice how her inflection consistently goes up? at the end of sentences? or clauses?

Is that what you meant by valley girl?

Yes. That's a major component of the "valley girl" accent.

Nah I lived with a woman in Burbank. Not my scene. Out of all the people in the LA suburbs I met whom I didn't like, that annoying valley girl accent never came up.

What about the ones you did like?

People are amazing at dinnertime.

When you say you "had friends for dinner" ...

1 more...

Your second question has a general answer. Most languages use tones, which means tones change in the course of a sentence. If the tone changes for all sentences, then it also changes for questions. I know that's not what you were trying to ask, but that's the answer to the question you did ask.

If you need a way to indicate that something is a question, you could do what English does... You could use question words at the beginning of the sentence. You could change word order. You could add extra words... Which is to say, you're not dependent on intonation, though you could use it if you want to.