ABSTRACT
O'Connor and Arnold (1961, 1973) was the culmination at the same time both of that type of intonational analysis conveniently called nuclear tone analysis and of the description of the attitudinal meanings associated with nuclear tones and their preceding ‘heads’ in Received Pronunciation (RP). Pike (1945), on the other hand, is a detailed analysis of General American (GA) intonation (indeed it is the only thorough analysis of GA), written in terms of four pitch levels, and associating meanings with primary pitch contours beginning on a stressed syllable and consisting of a sequence of pitch levels. Yet the overall impression conveyed by the two analyses is that in some sense we are dealing with the same system, particularly as regards the meanings associated with tunes. For example, Pike (p. 45) says that contours falling to pitch level 4 tend to have the meaning of finality and that possibly the most frequent for the majority of English speakers is the one beginning at pitch level 2 – the contour °2–4; similarly O'Connor and Arnold (1973: 53, 73) describe patterns using the High Fall as involving definiteness and completeness. Both imply that the unmarked pattern for declaratives is a fall (beginning on the last accented syllable) – the term ‘unmarked’ is employed more formally for this tone by Halliday (1968). Yet there are a number of reports that suggest a greater use of rises in a number of English dialects and hence also suggest a system very different from either RP or GA. Cruttenden (1986) attempted to survey in five and a half pages the extent and type of rises in such dialects. This to my knowledge was the first attempt at an overview of intonational variation in English. The intention of this article is to expand on those few pages by looking in detail at those dialects which use more rises than RP or GA. The assumption will be that those dialects of English which I do not mention will roughly follow RP and GA in their distribution of falls and rises; sometimes this has actually been confirmed by report, e.g. Burgess (1973) on Australian English, Haldenby (1959) on Lincolnshire and Bilton (1982) on Hull.
