High rising terminal

Last updated

The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as rising inflection, upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes-or-no questions. HRT has been claimed to be especially common among younger speakers and women, though its exact sociolinguistic implications are an ongoing subject of research.

Contents

Intonational characteristics

Empirically, one report proposes that HRT in American English and Australian English is marked by a high tone (high pitch or high fundamental frequency) beginning on the final accented syllable near the end of the statement (the terminal), and continuing to increase in frequency (up to 40%) to the end of the intonational phrase. [1] New research suggests that the actual rise can occur one or more syllables after the last accented syllable of the phrase, and its range is much more variable than previously thought. [2]

Usage

In the United States, the phenomenon of HRT may be fairly recent but is an increasingly common characteristic of speech especially among younger speakers. However, serious scientific and linguistic inquiry on this topic has a much more extensive history in linguistic journals from Australia, New Zealand, and Britain where HRT seems to have been noted as early as World War II.

It has been noted in speech heard in areas of Canada, in Cape Town, the Falkland Islands, and in the United States where it is often associated with a particular sociolect that originated among affluent teenage girls in southern California (see Valleyspeak and Valley girl). It was observed in Mississippi in 1963 (see "Twirling at Ole Miss" in Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes ). Elsewhere in the United States, this tonal pattern is characteristic of the speech heard in parts of the rural upper Midwest that have come under the influence of Norwegian phonology through Norwegian migration to Minnesota and North Dakota.

Although it is characterized in Britain as "Australian question intonation" (AQI) and blamed on the popularity of Australian soap operas among teenagers, HRT is also a feature of several Irish-English dialects, especially in mid-Ulster and Belfast English. [3]

Research published in 1986, regarding vernacular speech in Sydney, suggested that high rising terminal was used more than twice as often by young people than older people, and was more common among women than men. [4] In other words, HRT was more common among women born between 1950 and 1970, than among men born before 1950. The same research (and other sources) also suggested that the practice often served to discourage interruption, by indicating that a speaker had not quite completed a particular statement. [2] [5] [4]

High rising terminal also occurs in non-English languages, such as in Arabic (Iraqi Arabic, Egyptian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic), Amharic, Cham, Tuvaluan, and Dominican [6] and other varieties of Spanish. [7]

Effects

Media in Australia, Britain, and the United States have negatively portrayed the usage of HRT, claiming that its use exhibits a speaker's insecurities about the statement and undermines effective speaking. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] Time reports that it hampers job interviews. [13] However, other research has suggested HRT can be an effective way for speakers to establish common ground, and that its meaning is highly situational, derived from a "complex interaction of time, presupposition, and inference." [14]

Recent evidence shows that leaders of the peer group are more likely to use HRT in their declaratives than the junior members of the particular peer group. [2] [15] [16] According to University of Pennsylvania phonologist Mark Liberman, George W. Bush began to use HRT extensively in his speeches as his presidency continued. [17] Linguist Robin Lakoff drew attention to the pattern in her book Language and Women's Place, which argued that women were socialized to talk in ways that lacked power, authority, and confidence. Rising intonation on declarative sentences was one of the features Lakoff included in her description of "women's language." a gendered speech style which, in her view, both reflected and reproduced its users' subordinate social status. [18]

Implications for gender

Because HRT has been popularized as "Valley Girl Speak", it has acquired an almost exclusively feminine gender connotation. Studies confirm that more women use HRT than men. [19] Linguist Thomas J. Linneman contends, "The more successful a man is, the less likely he is to use HRT; the more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to use uptalk." [19] Though women appear to use HRT more often than men, the differences in frequency are not significant enough to brand HRT as an exclusively female speech pattern. Susan Miller, a vocal coach in Washington, D.C., insists that she receives both male and female clients with equal frequency—not because either gender is concerned that they sound too feminine, but that they sound too young. [20]

Findings have thus been inconclusive regarding HRT as a gendered speech pattern, though the (partial) evidence that HRT is more common among women is consistent with the third principle of the gender paradox identified by sociolinguist William Labov, namely that "in linguistic change from below, women use higher frequencies of innovative forms more than men do." Viewing HRT as "change from below" also explains why it appears to be more common among young speakers.

There appears to be merit to the claim that gendered connotations of HRT give rise to difficulties for women in particular. Anne Charity Hudley, a linguist at Stanford University, suggests, "When certain linguistic traits are tied to women . . . they often will be assigned a negative attribute without any actual evidence." [21] Negative associations with the speech pattern, in combination with gendered expectations, have contributed to an implication that for female speakers to be viewed as authoritative, they ought to sound more like men than women. These implications are perpetuated by various media, including the coverage of politics.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, for example, has voiced her concern that traditionally feminine speech patterns do not allow a female speaker to be taken seriously. "To meet those standards," she says, "you have to speak less like a young girl and more like a young, aspiring professional . . . it's a choice every young woman is going to have to make about how she wants to be and how she wants to be received." [22] Lydia Dallet of Business Insider affirms this concern. [23]

Origins

The origins of HRT remain uncertain. Anecdotal evidence places the conception of the American English variety on the West Coast—anywhere from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest. [24] This in turn comes into prominence due to development of "Valleyspeak" popularized by the Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" in the early 1980s.

With respect to the southern hemisphere, it has been suggested that the feature may have originated in New Zealand. [5]

It is unclear whether the American English varieties and the Oceanic varieties had any influence on each other regarding the spread of HRT.

See also

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, creaky voice refers to a low, scratchy sound that occupies the vocal range below the common vocal register. It is a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact. They normally vibrate irregularly at 20–50 pulses per second, about two octaves below the frequency of modal voicing, and the airflow through the glottis is very slow. Although creaky voice may occur with very low pitch, as at the end of a long intonation unit, it can also occur with a higher pitch. All contribute to make a speaker's voice sound creaky or raspy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Korean language</span> Language spoken in Korea

Korean is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea. The two countries have established standardized norms for Korean, and the differences between them are similar to those between Standard Chinese in mainland China and Taiwan, but political conflicts between the two countries have highlighted the differences between them. South Korean newspaper Daily NK has claimed North Korea criminalizes the use of the South's standard language with the death penalty, and South Korean education and media often portray the North's language as alien and uncomfortable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valley girl</span> Stereotype associated with upper-class, materialistic young woman with a Californian dialect

A valley girl is a socioeconomic, linguistic, and youth subcultural stereotype and stock character originating during the 1980s: any materialistic upper-middle-class young woman, associated with unique vocal and California dialect features, from the Los Angeles commuter communities of the San Fernando Valley. The term in later years was more broadly applied to any female in the United States who embodied ditziness, airheadedness, or greater interest in conspicuous consumption than in intellectual or personal accomplishment.

A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.

Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech.

Particularly within English, gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance. Historically, gay male speech characteristics have been highly stigmatized and their usage may be sometimes coded to a limited number of settings outside of the workplace or other public spaces.

In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.

Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.

"Voice therapy" or "voice training" refers to any non-surgical technique used to improve or modify the human voice. Because voice is a social cue to a person's sex and gender, transgender people may frequently undertake voice training or therapy as a part of gender transitioning in order to make their voices sound more typical of their gender, and therefore increase their likelihood of being perceived as that gender. Having voice and speech characteristics align with one's gender identity is often important to transgender individuals, whether their goal be feminization, neutralization or masculinization. Voice therapy can be seen as an act of gender- and identity-affirming care, in order to reduce gender dysphoria and gender incongruence, improve the self-reported wellbeing and health of transgender people, and alleviate concerns over an individual being recognized as transgender.

Dysprosody, which may manifest as pseudo-foreign accent syndrome, refers to a disorder in which one or more of the prosodic functions are either compromised or eliminated.

Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary in pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate to language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.

The vocal fry register is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure that permits air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency. During this phonation, the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together, which causes the vocal folds to compress rather tightly and become relatively slack and compact. This process forms a large and irregularly vibrating mass within the vocal folds that produces the characteristic low popping or rattling sound when air passes through the glottal closure. The register can extend far below the modal voice register, in some cases up to 8 octaves lower, such as in the case of Tim Storms who holds the world record for lowest frequency note ever produced by a human, a G−7, which is only 0.189 Hz, inaudible to the human ear.

Complimentary language is a speech act that caters to positive face needs. Positive face, according to Brown and Levinson, is "the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' claimed by interactions". Many studies examine complimentary language in relation to gender because of the noticeable differences in compliment topic, explicitness, and response depending on gender of the speaker as well as the gender of the addressee. Analysts use these studies to demonstrate their theories about inherent differences between the genders and the societal impact of gender roles.

LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBT communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBT communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.

The Japanese language has some words and some grammatical constructions associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. Such differences are sometimes called "gendered language". In Japanese, speech patterns associated with women are referred to as onna kotoba or joseigo, and those associated with men are referred to as danseigo.

Emotional prosody or affective prosody is the various non-verbal aspects of language that allow people to convey or understand emotion. It includes an individual's tone of voice in speech that is conveyed through changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses. It can be isolated from semantic information, and interacts with verbal content.

The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, who noted, "Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not." Specifically, the "paradox" arises from sociolinguistic data showing that women are more likely to use prestige forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables.

"Sexy baby voice" is an English language speech pattern or sociolect, first described by U.S. media in 2013, in which young women affect the high-pitched voice of pre-pubescent girls. Actress Lake Bell popularized the term with her 2013 film In a World..., and subsequently gave various interviews on the speech pattern.

References

  1. ↑ Ladd, R. D. (1996). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 123. ISBN   0-521-47498-1.
  2. 1 2 3 Warren, P. (2005). "Patterns of late rising in New Zealand English: Intonational variation or intonation change?". Language Variation and Change. 17 (2): 209–230. doi:10.1017/s095439450505009x. ISSN   0954-3945. S2CID   145431336.
  3. ↑ Stokel-Walker, Chris (11 August 2014). "The unstoppable march of the upward inflection?". BBC News . Retrieved 17 February 2022.
  4. 1 2 Guy, G.; Horvath, B.; Vonwiller, J.; Daisley, E.; Rogers, I. (1986). "An intonational change in progress in Australian English". Language in Society. 15: 23–52. doi:10.1017/s0047404500011635. ISSN   0047-4045. S2CID   146425401.
  5. 1 2 Allan, S. (1990). "The rise of New Zealand intonation". In Bell, A.; Holmes, J. (eds.). New Zealand ways of Speaking English . Clevendon: Multilingual Matters. pp.  115–128. ISBN   1-85359-083-5.
  6. ↑ Paul Warren (5 January 2016). Uptalk: The Phenomenon of Rising Intonation. Cambridge University Press. pp. 168–. ISBN   978-1-316-45385-8.
  7. ↑ Uptalk in Spanish Dating Shows?
  8. ↑ "Lake Bell talks about 'In a World ...' and the politics of dialect" The Washington Post , August 10, 2013
  9. ↑ A Female Senator Explains Why Uptalk Is Part of Women's 'Nature' The Atlantic, January 16, 2014
  10. ↑ "From Upspeak to Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices?" Fresh Air . NPR, July 23, 2015
  11. ↑ Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice by Naomi Woofe, July 24, 2015
  12. ↑ "The uptalk epidemic - Can you say something without turning it into a question?" Psychology Today, October 6, 2010.
  13. ↑ "3 speech habits that are worse than vocal fry in job interviews" Time, June 4, 2013
  14. ↑ Tomlinson, John M.; Fox Tree, Jean E. (2011-04-01). "Listeners' comprehension of uptalk in spontaneous speech". Cognition. 119 (1): 58–69. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.12.005. ISSN   0010-0277. PMID   21237451. S2CID   20141552.
  15. ↑ McLemore, C.A. (1991). "The Pragmatic Interpretation of English Intonation: Sorority Speech". Dissertation Abstracts International A: The Humanities and Social Sciences. 52 (4): 1311–A.
  16. ↑ Cheng, W.; Warren, M. (2005). "//CAN i help you //: The use of rise and rise-fall tones in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English". International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 10 (1): 85–107. doi:10.1075/ijcl.10.1.05che. hdl: 10397/619 . ISSN   1384-6655.
  17. ↑ Mark Liberman, "Uptalk uptick?". Language Log , 15 December 2005.
  18. ↑ Lakoff, Robin (2004). Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford UP. p. 49. ISBN   9780195347173.
  19. 1 2 Hoffman, Jan (December 23, 2013). "Overturning the Myth of Valley Girl Speak". The New York Times. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
  20. ↑ Rhodan, Maya (June 4, 2014). "3 Speech Habits That Are Worse Than Vocal Fry in Job Interviews". Time.com. Retrieved March 24, 2016.
  21. ↑ Winter, Caroline (April 24, 2014). "What Does How You Talk Have to Do With How You Get Ahead?". Bloomberg.com. Archived from the original on February 16, 2015. Retrieved March 24, 2016.
  22. ↑ Green, Emma (January 16, 2014). "A Female Senator Explains Why Uptalk Is Part of Women's 'Nature'". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 24, 2016.
  23. ↑ Dallet, Lydia (January 25, 2014). "This Communication Quirk Could Cost You a Promotion". Business Insider. Retrieved August 14, 2016.
  24. ↑ Do you speak American? American Varieties: Pacific Northwest

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.