High Rising Terminals in Dublin: forms, functions and gender

Abstract

High Rising Terminals, Uptalk, or Upspeak, are stylistic rises that can be found at the end of declarative statements. They have been studied in numerous varieties of English and in other languages too. It has been shown that these rises can take on different phonetic and phonological forms and convey various pragmatic functions depending on the varieties in which they are found. The present study provides a description of these forms and functions in Dublin (Republic of Ireland). Based on a corpus of 5 speakers from the PAC-Dublin corpus that was recorded in the Irish capital in 2018, the study shows that HRTs are mainly realized with late rises and nuclear rises and that they are different from interrogative and continuative rises, notably because they are steeper than the latter. A sociolinguistic analysis of our corpus also shows that the gender of the speakers has an influence on the occurrence of the phenomenon, which does not seem to be the case for age range. This article thus provides a multidimensional analysis of stylistic rising tones in statements in Dublin.