Uptalk in Southern Californian English and Mexican Spanish

Abstract

“Uptalk” is the tendency for declarative sentences to end with rising intonation instead of falling intonation. In Southern Californian English, uptalk is realized with a shallow pitch rise [L-H% in Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) labeling]. In contrast to this are polar questions, which are typically realized with steep rises (H-H%) [Ritchart and Arvaniti 2014]. Uptalk has also been impressionistically found in the variety of Spanish spoken in Mexico City. Mexican Spanish has three forms of phrase-final rises: low-to-high rises (LH%), low-to-mid rises (LM%), and high-to-high rises (HH%) [de-la-Mota et al. 2010], whereas English only has low and high rises [Beckman & Ayers Elam 1997]. Given the larger inventory of possible phrase-final melodies in Spanish vs. English, uptalk may be realized differently in the former than the latter. To determine whether uptalk in Spanish differs from uptalk in English, we analyzed the intonation from one representative female speaker of each language. Fifty phrases from each language were extracted from recordings of two television shows, Laguna Beach (for English) and Rebelde (for Spanish). Two coders then labeled each phrase using ToBI conventions for English and Spanish. The phonological and phonetic differences between English vs. Spanish uptalk will be discussed.