Intonational Cues to Interrogative Intentin African American English
Cybelle SmithLSA Annual MeetingJanuary 6th, 2012
How do you know it’s a question?
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Interrogative Cues
• Question Words (what,who, Japanese “ka”)
• Syntactic Cues• Intonational Cues• Facial Expression,Gestures
• Context / Pragmatic Cues
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Interrogative CuesAcross Languages
Differences• Syntactic andlexical markers
• Differentintonational tunes(nuclear accent,boundary tones)
Proposed (near)-Universals
• Tendency towardshigh pitch
• Syntactic/LexicalTrade-‐off withIntonation
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Syntax-‐Intonation Trade-‐Off
+Intonation
+Inversion+What+Intonation +Inversion
+Intonation
What are you eating?
Are you eating pizza?
You’re eating pizza?
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AAE Syntactic Cues• Less auxiliary inversion than SAE
– only ~39% of yes-‐no questions explicitly inverted(Melnick and Rickford 2011)
• Copula deletion and regularization of 3rd-‐singular leads to syntactic ambiguity:– Them boys still bad
• (Are) them boys still bad?• Them boys (are) still bad.
– She live around here• (Does) she live around here?• She live(s) around here.
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AAE Intonational Cues
• Less likely to have rising pitch on finalsyllable of yes-‐no questions than SAE– Tarone (1973)– Jun and Foreman (1996)
• more variable boundary tones in AAE than SAEduring role-‐playing
– Green (2002)• flat final syllable (SW Louisiana teens and adults)
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Questions
• How are AAE speakers marking yes-‐noquestions?– Different intonational cues from SAE?– Cues outside of intonation and syntax?
• Does the syntax-‐intonation trade-‐offapply to AAE?
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Claims
• AAE speakers mark yes-‐no questionsintonationally using an early slow rise in pitch
• When SAE speakers exaggerate L*H, AAE speakers exaggerate early rise (confirming questions)• Syntax-‐intonation trade-‐off does apply:
– Inversion correlates with final syllable pitch slope inmale AAE speakers
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Methods
• Corpus analysis:– CALLFRIEND American English (Southernand Non-‐Southern Dialect)
– East Palo Alto Sociolinguistic Interview withFoxy Boston (name of main interviewee)
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CALLFRIEND• 30 min. phone conversations• “Southern” or “non-‐southern” dialectbased on vowel phonology
• All AAE speakers = “southern dialect”,regardless of geography
• No ethnic data on individual speakers -‐-‐How do I know this is AAE?
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AAE Identification• First: picked speakers from northern cities in the Southern Dialect
corpus• Next: verified speakers were using other AAE features:
– zero copula– doesn’t -‐> don’t– consonant cluster simplification (e.g. talked -‐> talk, slipped -‐> slip)– other sound changes (e.g ð. -‐> d)
• Additional evidence:– Lexical items (brother, sister)– Use of falsetto by one of the male speakers
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Data Collection: SpeakersSpeaker
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5
6
7
8
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10
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Corpus
Cal
lfrien
dSoci
olin
g
Inte
rvie
w
Gender
Male(4)
Female(8)
Place
East Palo Alto(4)
New York(2)
Michigan(2)
Pennsylvania(4)
Variety
AAVE-influenced HE (1)
SAE (1)
AAVE (1)
SAE (1)
AAVE(2)
SAE(2)
AAVE(4)
7 AAE4 SAE1 HE
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Data Collection: Tokens
• Questions identified and screened forpragmatic intent based on Bolinger (1957)– Information-‐Seeking (IS)– Information-‐Confirming (IC) More on this later!
•No tag questions or particles•No “back-‐channeling”•Tokens with bad sound quality dropped
End Result: 125 yes-no questions
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publica
publications
Quantitative Metrics
Getting any publications?Whole QuestionFinal Word
Final Syllable
Final Stressed Syllable (FSS)
Syllable Before FSS
First Syllable of Final Word
tions
Example Question from CALLFRIEND:
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Pitch slope from minimumto maximum
Pitch slope fromstart to end
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Motivation for Features
Results
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Final Syllable Pitch Slope• AAE speakers more likely to have level or falling final syllable
pitch slopeThe Pennsylvania Males:
N = 40, p = .035N = 40, p = .038AAE SAE AAE
(Start to End) (Min to Max)
SAE
Pitch Slope (Hz/s)
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Influence of Stress• Dialectal difference greater when last twosyllables “unstressed stressed”
The Pennsylvania Males
n = 40, p = .035 n = 15, p = .039AAE AAE SAESAE
Pitch Slope (Hz/s)
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Whole Question Pitch Slope• Pitch slope over the question as a whole is surprisingly similar
The Pennsylvania Males
AAE SAE AAE SAE
(Start to End) (Min to Max)
Pitch Slope (Hz/s)
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Question Riseby Different Means
19-‐year-‐old Female SAE Speaker from NY
40-‐year-‐oldMale AAESpeakerfrom PA
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Implications
• Liu and Xu (2007)– Yes-‐no questions diverge from declaratives atstressed syllable of first content word
– Post-‐focus syllable pitch range compressed andraised in questions, compressed and lowered instatements
• Could AAE speakers be using this early rise as aprimary intonational cue to interrogativity?
Functional Sensitivity
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Information Seeking vs.Confirming Questions
• Information seeking:A question to which you don’t know the answer:– Are your parents around?
• Confirming:– Foxy: Well-‐ I don't know hardly about nothing go on cause I'm newthere. I just started.
– Interviewer: That's right. In September huh?– Foxy: Um mm, I started in October.– Interviewer: Oh in October. So you didn't start at the beginning of theyear?
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Higher Terminal Pitchin Confirming Questions
• Across speaker groups Info-‐Confirming(IC) Questions showed:– greater pitch range on the final syllable– higher maximum pitch on the final syllable
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Higher Terminal Pitchin Confirming Questions
• Unexpected find:– Venditti et al. (2006) found Info-Seeking (IS)questions had a higher F0 at the nuclear accent andboundary tone than Info-Con/irming (IC) questionsin student-‐tutor dialogs
• Possible explanations:– Different setting: Maybe confirming questionscorrelate with surprise/excitement in phoneconversations, but not in an educational setting?
– Elimination of “back-‐channeling” questions
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What happens if youexaggerate this cue?
L*H
Early, Gradual Rise
HigherHigh
LowerLow
HigherHigh
HigherLow
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Dialectal Differences
• AAE males raise minimum pitch on last syllable, pitchrange increase not significant
• SAE females lower minimum pitch on last syllable, pitchrange significantly larger
L*H
Early, Gradual Rise
HigherHigh
LowerLowHigherHigh
HigherLow
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Interesting Parallel• AAE and SAE speakers use different contours to express interrogativity
BUT the correlation between– ConJirming information and– Exaggerated intonational cues to interrogativity
in this dataset remains the same
• Open Question:• How generalizable is this trend?• Can this trend be found in other corpora of natural casual dialogue, with
unrestricted topics of conversation?
Sensitivity to Syntax
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Syntax-‐Intonation Trade-‐Off
+Intonation
+Inversion+What+Intonation +Inversion
+Intonation
What are you eating?
Are you eating pizza?
You’re eating pizza?
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HigherRise
Syntax-‐Intonation Trade-‐Off
Grabe 2004
Decl.
Wh QInvertedYes-‐No Q
Non-‐InvertedYes-‐No Q
% Final Rise in F0+Lex+Syn +Syn
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Inversion and Pitch Slope• Large effect for AAE males, nonsig.correlation for everyone else
p < .01
• Not due to acorrelationbetweeninversion and q.function
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Summary• AAE speakers DO use a reliable intonational cue tomark interrogativity: gradual early rise in F0
• Confirming questions showed exaggeration ofintonational cues even when cues were different
• AAE showed sensitivity to syntactic structure:– Final syllable pitch slope increased in absence of syntactic cues
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Thank you!• Meghan Sumner, advisor• John Rickford, lots of helpful advice, allowed use of EPANeighborhood Survey
• Additional people I should thank:Kathryn Potts, Arto Antilla, Christopher Potts, RobertPodesva, Tyler Kendall, Sun-‐Ah Jun, Lisa Green, MarisaTice, Marie-‐Catherine de Marneffe, Jason Grafmiller,David Clausen, Mark Linsey
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ReferencesBolinger, Dwight. (1957). Interrogative structures of American English. Publications of the
American Dialect Society, 28. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.Grabe, E. (2004). Intonational variation in urban dialects of English spoken in the British Isles. In
Gilles, P. and Peters, J. (eds.), Regional Variation in Intonation. Linguistische Arbeiten,Tuebingen, Niemeyer, 9-‐31.
Green, Lisa J. (2002). African American English: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
Haan, Judith (2001). Speaking of Questions. An Exploration of Dutch Question Intonation.Dissertation, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT).
Jun, Sun-‐Ah and Christina Foreman. (1996). Boundary tones and focus realization in AfricanAmerican English Intonation. Abstract. Third Joint Meeting of ASA and ASJ. Hawaii. Fall.
Liu, F. and Xu, Y. (2007). Question intonation as affected by word stress and focus in English.In Proceedings of The 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrucken. August,2007. 1189-‐1192.
Melnick, R. and J. Rickford. (2011). Processing constraints and socio-‐variation interact in creolequestion formation. Poster presented at the 24th Annual Conference on Human SentenceProcessing (CUNY). Stanford, CA.
Tarone, Elaine E. (1973). Aspects of intonation in Black English. American Speech. Duke UniversityPress. 48-‐1/2, 29-‐36.
Venditti, Jeffifer J., Hirshberg, Julia and Liscombe, Jackson. (2006). Intonational Cues to StudentQuestions in Tutoring Dialogs. Proc. Interspeech, Pittsburgh, 1-‐4.
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Final Syllable Pitch RangeFemales
p = .618 p = .015*
Males
Information Confirming
Information Seeking
p = .901 p = .351
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Final Syllable Maximum PitchFemales Males
Information Confirming
Information Seeking
p = .718 p = .059 p = .010** p = .783
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Final Syllable Minimum PitchFemales Males
Information Confirming
Information Seeking
p = .308 p = .597 p = .005** p = .723
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AAE Contour SimilarityOver Age, Distance, GenderFoxy Boston, Female, Age 13, 1986, East Palo Alto
CFM40PA, Male, Age 40, c.1996, Grew up in PA
Was it fun?
Going to school?
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