English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Niš, Serbia.
Phonetica. 2023 Mar 16;79(6):551-589. doi: 10.1515/phon-2022-0028. Print 2022 Dec 16.
Uptalk has been increasingly documented in different L1 English varieties and communicative contexts, but is rarely recognized in formal L2 educational contexts, where it is still attributed to learners' inadequate mastery of intonation. This study is a cross-sectional corpus-based exploration of the phonetic realization of uptalk in Serbian EFL students' semi-spontaneous expository speech, and its perception as a sentence-finality signal. The corpus comprised all rising intonation units (IU) produced by 14 female and 9 male participants, classified by structural clues as syntactic continuation, listing, polar questions, or uptalk, to explore the relatedness of the phonetic properties to structural position and gender. Next, 100 EFL students rated selected phrases, illustrating continuation rises, uptalk, and final falls, as possibly sentence final, on a 5-point scale. The findings showed that uptalk was consistently produced as a phonetically distinct signal, characterized by a larger pitch excursion, a steeper rise slope, a higher rise peak, and a longer post-IU pause. Females produced wider pitch excursions and steeper slopes. Uptalk examples were ranked high as possible sentence-finality signals. The study suggests that EFL speakers' uptalk should be recognized as a novel socio-pragmatic prosodic device, deliberately used even in more formal academic contexts.
在不同的母语为英语的英语变体和交际语境中，上语调的使用越来越多地被记录下来，但在正式的第二语言教育语境中却很少被识别到，在这种语境中，上语调仍归因于学习者对语调掌握不足。本研究是对塞尔维亚英语作为外语的学生在半自发的说明文演讲中使用上语调的语音实现及其作为句子终结信号的感知的跨截面语料库探索。语料库由 14 名女性和 9 名男性参与者所产生的所有上升语调单位（IU）组成，根据结构线索分为句法延续、列举、疑问和上语调，以探索其语音特征与结构位置和性别的相关性。接下来，100 名英语作为外语的学生对所选短语进行了评价，这些短语分别为延续上升、上语调以及最后的下降，在 5 点量表上表示可能是句子的结尾。研究结果表明，上语调始终作为一种独特的语音信号产生，其特点是音高幅度更大、上升斜率更陡、上升峰值更高、IU 后停顿时间更长。女性产生的音高幅度更大，斜率更陡。上语调的例子被评为很可能是句子终结的信号。研究表明，英语作为外语的使用者的上语调应该被视为一种新颖的社会语用韵律手段，即使在更正式的学术语境中也可以被有意使用。
