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.
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.
Could you give some specific examples of questions in English that would not be asked with a rising tone at the end?
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.
“Who is my daddy and what does he do?” actually seems to drop a little bit.
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.
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.
Um Chinese may want to have a word with you
I’m learning Chinese now and it seems to have a similar change in pitch as European languages when asking a question. 你说汉语吗？
That’s just a coincidence. 吗, meaning “what?”, is pronounced má which has the ascending tone. This is not true of all questions in Chinese. For example: 谁在你的右边 meaning “who is on your right?” does not end with 吗, and 边 is pronounced bian which has the flat tone.
Hi! I’m Chinese and this is incorrect. 吗 (mā) and 边 (biān) actually have the same flat intonation, so there isn’t a rise in pitch in either of the questions. To answer OP, the word 吗 in particular is just typically used to end off some sentences in order to differentiate whether they are statements or questions, ie. 你要回家。(You want to go home.) vs 你要回家吗？(Do you want to go home?)
