Abstract
The aim of this study is to explore the result of the contact between two systems of intonation in bilingual speakers. In particular, it explores possible cross-linguistic influence in the prosodic marking of English questions by speakers of Malay. Ten L1 Malay speakers and ten L1 Malay speakers of English participated in a Map Task, where they produced a total of 259 utterances that were classified as questions following Freed’s (1994) system. For each of them, their function, grammatical form and nuclear pitch accent were analysed. Results show that syntactically unmarked questions are produced significantly more frequently in the L2 English than in the L1 Malay. Moreover, the prosodic marking of questions by Malay speakers of English is systematic: questions consisting of a single word and yes–no questions with inversion have rising nuclei, wh-questions with an utterance-initial wh-word have falls, while wh-questions with an utterance-final wh-word have rises. This two-fold prosodic marking of wh-questions is argued to reflect indirect cross-linguistic influence.
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Gut, U., Pillai, S. (2015). The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English. In: Delais-Roussarie, E., Avanzi, M., Herment, S. (eds) Prosody and Language in Contact. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45168-7_4
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