Abstract
It is generally said that falling intonation is used at the end of a declarative sentence. However, this is not the case with all stretches of spontaneous speech marked in transcription as sentences. In order to consider the relationship between punctuation and tone patterns, this paper examines intonation patterns at the end of sentences in oral presentations, and discusses instances where falling intonation does not occur. The texts used for analysis are eight oral presentations collected at international conferences in the field of physics, and comparison is made with BBC news and lectures compiled in the Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus. Quantitative and qualitative analysis is carried out. Three major factors were found for the non-occurrence of falling intonation at sentence boundaries, and the findings are considered in terms of discourse strategies which affect the production of a text.
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