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<Paper uid="W97-1205">
  <Title>Can pitch accent type convey information status in yes-no questions?</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="29" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
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    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we examine the intonation of polar questions. Such questions may elicit an affirmative or negative reply concerning information which is totally new, i.e. where the speaker believes the information is not recoverable from the dialogue context. These are often referred to as information-seeking questions. They may also; however, refer to old information, i.e. that which the speaker believes has already been conveyed. These are often referred to as confirmation-seeking questions. Using a corpus of task-oriented dialogues, we investigate how far it is possible in such questions to make a clear-cut binary distinction between old and new information and whether this distinction is reflected in the choice of intonation pattern used.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A distinction has been made in the analysis of a dialogue corpus in English (Carletta et al, 1995) where information-seeking questions are referred to as QUERIES and confirmation-seeking questions as CHECKS. In the canonical examples given in English, QUERIES and CHECKS are syntactically distinct (Kowtko et al, 1992; Carletta et al, 1995); &amp;quot;Do you have a rockfall?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;So you want me to go down two inches?&amp;quot;, respectively. The former uses interrogative and the latter declarative syntax.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In Italian, on the other hand, where all yes-no question types have the same syntactic form as declaratives, the intonation pattern plays a greater role. &amp;quot;Vado a destra&amp;quot; can be translated as &amp;quot;I go to the right&amp;quot; (statement), &amp;quot;Do I go to the fight?&amp;quot; (QUERY) or &amp;quot;(So) I go to the right?&amp;quot; (CHECK). We therefore investigate dialogues in Italian where it is possible to isolate the role of intonation patterns.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Intonation contours can be analysed as having two types of tonal specification: tones which have a prominence-lending function, referred to here as pitch accents, and those which delimit intonational phrases, referred to here as boundary tones (Pierrehumbert,1980; Beckman and Ayers 1994). In Standard Italian (SI), it is argued that the boundary tone or a combination of pitch accent and boundary tone play a role in distinguishing questions from statements (Avesani, 1990; Chapallaz, 1979; D'Eugenio, 1982; Canepari, 1980; Agard and di Pietro, 1965). In all cited cases of SI yes-no questions have a final rising contour or high boundary tone. In a number of other varieties of Italian, those spoken in Bari (Grice and Savino, 1995) and Palermo (Grice  1995) for instance, it is solely the pitch accent which has the distinguishing function. Our analysis here is based on a corpus of Bari Italian dialogues, allowing us to concentrate on the relation between pitch accent type and question type.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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