(Up)talking by ourselves: Final rising intonation in the absence of interlocutors
Abstract
Previous studies of uptalk have primarily sourced data from sociolinguistic interviews and speech corpora of direct conversations, and only men’s and women’s uses of uptalk have been widely reported on. This study extends this work by examining uptalk in the novel context of spontaneous speech that lacks an interlocutor and by also including non-binary speakers. As uptalk is primarily described in the literature as having the social function of signaling the speaker’s turn, its presence in the absence of an interlocutor may suggest that uptalk has become an established prosodic feature of American English. Participants (49 men, 56 women, and 80 non-binary) were recorded online in the absence of another speaker. They were asked to describe their microphone setup and the process of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (PB&J). In the microphone task, only 25% of utterances exhibited uptalk, whereas in the PB&J task, 40.57% did. These findings suggest that uptalk is used by speakers even in the absence of an interlocutor when holding the floor with rising intonation is not needed.