Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 21:01:51 EDT
From: Larry Horn LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU
Subject: Re: statements spoken as if it were a question
Benjamin Barrett wonders,
Am I missing something, not knowing much about Southern speech?
Using a rising tone at the end of a sentence to make a question is a very
common form of question in English at large.
...to which Natalie points out,
I thought we were talking about using question intonation in statements
--
e.g., I went to the movies last nIGHT. I saw this great movIE. (caps=
rising pitch).
Alternately put (since after all, Benjamin's examples--e.g. "You're going?"--
have the SYNTACTIC form of statements), we're talking about speaker's
intention: to make a statement without appearing too "assertive", rather than
to ask the hearer for information that the hearer is a better position than
the speaker to provide. This is the phenomenon popularly called "Upspeak" or
"Uptalk", or rather "Upspeak?" I think Robin Lakoff, in her _Language and
Woman's Place_ (Harper & Row, 1974) was the first to suggest upspeak as a
stylistic characteristic of women's speech, but she's been followed by
dozens of writers on language and gender who have either supported or
challenged her generalization, including some who have ascribed the tendency
to "powerless" style as opposed to "women's style". Most of the writing in
this domain leaves the regional issue untouched. (There's also a paper in a
recent Journal of Pragmatics by Julia Hirschberg and Gregory Ward on some of
the formal properties of upspeak, including a representation of the phonetics.
Less formally, there have many treatments in the popular press, including
Bill Safire and various op-ed writers in the New York Times, and a great
satirical piece that someone posted to us on this list a couple of months
back.)
Larry