Rising Declaratives
Linguistics
WHO: Pranav Anand, Amanda Rysling, Emily Knick, Julia Helmer
WHAT: This project investigates how speakers produce inquisitive rising declaratives (IRDs) and assertive rising declaratives (ARDs). Rising declaratives are sentences where the words alone resemble a typical declarative sentence but are pronounced with a rising intonation, similar to questions. An example of this is shown in (1).
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[Context: You’re talking with someone about your mutual friend Teddy, who you’ve known for years. You know Teddy very well and have spent a significant amount of time with their family.]
Speaker A: Teddy is bringing his sister to the party.
Speaker B: Teddy has a sister?
The example in (1) is an IRD. IRDs signal that the speaker is ignorant regarding the topic and are asking the addressee, who is knowledgeable on the topic, for information.
An example of an ARD is displayed in (2). Unlike IRDs, ARDs signal that the speaker is not ignorant, but rather is knowledgeable to some extent on the topic at hand. In ARDs, rather than asking for information about the topic, the speaker is asserting (i.e., communicating) information, and the addressee is the one who is ignorant on the topic.
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[Context: You’re talking with someone about your mutual friend Teddy, who you’ve known for years. You know Teddy very well and have spent a significant amount of time with their family, who you know live in the area.]
Speaker A: Teddy isn’t staying with anyone this spring break, since he has no family living nearby.
Speaker B: Teddy has a sister?
WHY: Is there a drastic difference in the pitch rises between inquisitive rising declaratives and assertive rising declaratives? Is this difference consistent in speech production? Jeong (2018) suggests that there is a difference, but it has not yet been systematically tested in speakers’ productions.
WHAT'S NEXT: Either (1) finding more examples of IRDs and ARDs in natural speech and analyzing the pitch tracks in PRAAT or (2) designing a production experiment involving scripted IRDs and ARDs
THE WOW: We’ve found several examples of rising declaratives in a wide range of media, from RuPaul’s Drag Race to TikTok
