Quand les paroles s’envolent : réflexions sur les caractéristiques et la forme phonétique du High Rising Terminal en anglais contemporain by Stephan Wilhelm

“…Hirschberg & Ward 1995, Ladd 1996, Fletcher et al. 2005, Liberman 2006b) insist that the name ‘High Rising Terminal’ implies that the intonation contours favoured by ‘uptalkers’ are mainly high-rises, i.e. rising nuclear tones which start relatively high in the speakers’ pitch range and end at a very high pitch, so that the voice often becomes ‘squeaky’ (Cruttenden 1997). Other research (e.g. Britain 1992, Fletcher & Harrington 2001, Barry 2007), however, suggests that the HRT may differ somewhat from this description.Based on a corpus of personal conversational narratives containing recordings of different geographical varieties of contemporary English, this paper enquires which definitions of the HRT really match the facts and investigates the phonetics of uptalk. …”
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