9mo ago

Why do all languages share the same intonation for questions?

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?

58 comments

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.
  
  I read this as you emphasizing true, not pitching up.
- Sorry; maybe try again and think of some other cases?
  
  No
- 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?
  
  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.
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.
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
- 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.
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? "

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?

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