<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W97-1205">
  <Title>Can pitch accent type convey information status in yes-no questions?</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper analyses the intonation of polar questions extracted from a corpus of task-oriented dialogues in the Bari variety of Italian. They are classified using a system developed for similar dialogues in English where each question is regarded as an initiating move in a conversational game (Carletta et al 1995). It was found that there was no one-to-one correspondence between move-type and intonation pattern. An alternative classification was carried out taking into account information status, that is, whether or not the information requested by the speaker is recoverable from the previous dialogue context. It is found that the degree of confidence with which the speaker believes the information to be shared with the interlocutor is reflected in the choice of pitch accent and postfocal accentual pattern. Low confidence polar questions contain a L+H* focal pitch accent and allow for accents to follow it, whereas high confidence ones contain a H*+L focal pitch accent, followed by deaccenting or suppression of accents.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>