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In this study, we analyse a sample of 76 utterances drawn from a corpus of spontaneous speech from the north of England. The selected statements present a declarative structure with different pragmatic functions (yes/no questions, echo questions, tag questions, and rhetorical questions). The objective of this study is to observe and describe the intonation of questions with a declarative structure in English from the north of England in spontaneous speech. Likewise, the pertinent bibliographic review is carried out for its subsequent discussion in view of the results obtained. The analysis is carried out in Praat, through the Melodic Analysis of Speech method (CANTERO, 2002) that allows the extraction of stylized, quantifiable and comparable melodic curves. As a result of this analysis, we obtain five different melodic that we can define as rising (21%), falling (50%), rising-falling (13%), final inflection with raised nucleus (4%), and declination and final rising inflection (12%).

In this paper, we report the analysis of the melodic behavior of wh-questions from the North of England. The corpus contains 107 utterances issued by 19 different native informants in real communicative situations, extracted from recordings of street interviews published on YouTube and carried out in the cities of York, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool. The analysis is conducted through the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) method (Cantero, 2002) which allows us to quantify, standardize and compare melodic configurations. The results describe four different intonation patterns for this type of question. A rising final inflection pattern (E1: 27%); a falling final inflection pattern (E2: 58%); a circumflex rising-falling final inflection pattern (E3: 5%); and a high nucleus falling pattern (E4: 10%). After describing and quantifying each of these patterns, the results are discussed in relation to those melodic descriptions made by precedent authors in the existing literature.