The use of High Rising Terminal intonation contours (HRTs) in statements is a particularly salient and often stigmatized feature of a number of varieties of English. In recent years a number of linguists have investigated the feature from pragmatic (ching 1982, Meyerhoff 1991) and sociolinguistic (Guy, Horvath, Vonwiller, Diasley and Rogers 1986, Allen 1990, Britain 1992) perspectives and its use has also stimulated long running debates in the press (New York Times, Fall 1991; Sydney Morning Herald, June 1992) about its origins, functions and appropriateness. In this paper, we combine a brief discussion of its use and dunction with a F0-plot analysis of a number of HRT contours from recordings made in Wellington, New Zealand in 1989.

This paper will present a preliminary phonetic description of yes-no questions in Nchufie (also known as Bafanji), a Grassfields Bantoid language of the Nun group in the Mbam-Nkam family spoken in Northwestern Cameroon by approximately 8,500 people (Grimes 1988). As there is no published description of this language, a very brief review of the Nchufie segment inventory will be in order. Following this, an instrumental description of the yes-no questions in the language will be presented, focusing on the prosodic cues of duration and pitch. Of special interest will be the interaction of intonation with lexical tone and the representation and cross-linguistic significance of Nchufie yes-no question formation. Below is a brief description of the phonetic segment inventory of Nchufie. Due to the complexities of Nchufie phonology and tonology, the following description should be considered preliminary only; the details are not well understood.

The study of the temporal organization of spoken language has developed greatly over the past three decades. Segment based analyses, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) looked at temporal patterns and other physical properties of speech as being “supplied by universal rules.” However, several researchers have published experimental evidence which indicates that temporal differences do exist between languages and have to be learned (Lehiste 1970, 1984, 1987, Port, Al-Ani & Maeda 1980, Keating 1979, Flege 1979, Flege & Port 1981, Mitleb 1984a, 1984b).

At the 1989 IPA Convention in Kiel it was decided that in the latest version of the IPA writing system no recognition be granted to a feature of force of articulation. At the time I questioned the advisability of this action, but another viewpoint won the day. Very possibly the refusal to allow for the notation of ‘fortis-lenis’ judgments in IPA transcription was based primarily on the conviction that ‘articulatory force’ has no generally accepted physical correlate, but whatever the basis for the decision, I would reiterate the opinion that it was wrongheaded, even though I too am reluctant to accept any of the suggested meanings attached to the terms ‘fortis’ and ‘lenis’ as sufficient for regarding force of articulation as an independent dimension of phonetic description. However, the function of the IPA alphabet is to facilitate the communication of phonetic judgments of speech. It has not been proposed, so far as I know, that the IPA alphabet represent only those judgments couched in terms that allow for physical disconfirmation.

Martin Kioster-Jensen (1991) has traced the origin of the view that [h] is a glottal fricative back to the German scholar Brücke (1876). According to MK-J, this wrong view has been repeated in the manuals of phonetics since then and appears again in the new IPA consonant chart.