2025P The evolution of uptalk in Standard Southern British

Early 21st century studies of uptalk, the use of statement-final pitch rises instead of falls, in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) indicate that at the time uptalk was an innovation: it was infrequent, though increasingly used (Bradford, 1997), especially by women (Barry, 2008) and highly variable in form, with no systematic distinction from other types of rises (Shobbrook & House, 2003). To investigate its current state, we analysed 977 rising utterances from 29 SSBE speakers (19 female) reading scripted dialogues intended to elicit rises indicating requests for confirmation, uncertainty, negotiation, polar questions, listing, and sarcasm (Table 1). The first three functions are associated with uptalk (Arvaniti & Atkins, 2016) and are predicted to have similar shapes, but should differ from non-uptalk rises if uptalk is now an established SSBE feature. Pitch contours were submitted to Functional Principal Component Analysis (Ramsay et al., 2020); the first three principal components (PCs) reflected differences regarding the starting point and extent of the rise (PC1), the scaling of the rise start (PC2), and the rise’s overall convex or concave shape (PC3); see Figure 1. LMERs of the PC coefficients of the input curves and a Generalized Additive Mixed Model (GAMM) (van Rij et al., 2022) confirmed the importance of these differences and showed that gender did not affect shape, but pragmatic category did (Figure 1). The uptalk contours were comparable. Sarcasm had a similar shape but scaled lower, polar questions demonstrated a fall-rise pattern absent from uptalk, while listing had a rise-plateau shape. The results support the prediction that uptalk is establishing, since its form is now stable and distinct from rises of competing functions, with no gender differentiation in either frequency or form.

=> See Table and Figure in the pdf document


References

Arvaniti, A., & Atkins, M. (2016). Uptalk in Southern British English. In J. Barnes, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck- Hufnagel, & N. Veilleux (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Boston: Boston University, pp.153- 157. https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-32
Barry, A. S. (2008). The form, function and distribution of high rising intonation: A Comparative Study of HRT in Southern Californian and Southern British English. VDM Verlag.
Bradford, B. (1997). Upspeak in British English. English Today, 13(3), 29-36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400009810
Ramsay, J. O., Graves, S., & Hooker, G. (2020). fda: Functional Data Analysis. R package version 5.1.5.1.
Van Rij, J., M. Wieling, R. Baayen & H. van Rijn. (2022). itsadug: Interpreting Time Series and Autocorrelated Data Using GAMMs. R package version 2.4.1.
Shobbrook, K., & House, J. (2003). High rising tones in southern British English. In M. J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Barcelona: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, pp.1273-127.