Intonation of the dictum questions with the interrogative word kem in the Altai language

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental phonetic analysis of the Altai language intonation in terms of a communicative focus of the utterance. The interrogative intonation implementation was studied in sounding texts recorded from six informants, all representatives of the Altai-Kizhi dialect. In Altai, as in other Turkic languages, interrogative utterances are mainly expressed in lexical-grammatical and intonational ways. The first involves using interrogative pronouns such as kem “who,” ne “what,” kandyy “what, which,” kancha “how much,” and others, and the interrogative particle ba. The phonetic analysis revealed a wide intonational variability of dictum interrogative utterances with the interrogative pronoun kem. The intonation was found to depend on the interrogative word position. With kem at the beginning, the utterance has an even tone or is marked by an ascending-descending change in the frequency of the basic tone. With kem in the end, the ascending movement of the tone is observed, suggesting the utterance incompleteness and the expectation of the listener’s response. With kem in the middle position, a descending tone is observed, the intonational contour being wavelike: ascending-descending-ascending-descending. Overall, the intonational contour of questions with the word kem can be characterized as descending-rising, but with kem at the very end, the tone is ascending, the frequency difference of the basic tone in all the examples ranging from 5 to 7 pt. The next step will be to specify the trends identified by expanding the research corpus and describing the general pattern of intonation of dictum questions in statements with different interrogative words.