This paper focuses on rising contours in English read speech. Our hypothesis is that they are very few in this particular speech style. This is confirmed by quantitative and qualitative analyses, conducted on a corpus of read speech by native English speakers with a standard British English accent. The main result of the quantitative analyses is that out of 1076 tone units, 82% (whether final or not) are uttered with a falling contour, which is much more than could be expected. The qualitative analyses consisted in a thorough examination of the intonation contours in relation with the syntactic characteristics of our data, as well as an analysis of the pragmatic functions of the contours. They allow us to revisit the generally accepted idea that falling contours are associated with final statements and rises with yes-no questions and continuation. We show that the tonal sequence fall plus fall is by far the most common in read speech, whatever the syntactic structure, except for enumerations. Contrary to what is stated in the literature, the main function of rising contours is not to indicate non-finality and continuation, but rather to convey attitudes, at least in read speech.

This paper presents a corpus study of four non-canonical English structures used for information packagingextrapositions, right dislocations, it-clefts, wh-clefts. We study the relations between the information structure and the prosodic patterns (tonality, tonicity and tones) and show that the canonical (expected) prosody of these structures is not the most frequent one in semi-spontaneous speech, meaning that the canonical use of these structures might not be canonical at all in terms of frequency. It is argued that in discourse the pragmatic functions of the non-canonical structures studied derive from the complex interactions between syntax and prosody. Tonality reveals the informativeness (relevance at this point of discourse) of each part of the structure, adding meaning to that of the syntactic structure. Inside the intonation phrase, tonicity indicates what is old or new information, sometimes countering the canonical use of syntax, and can be used for highlighting or contrastive purposes. As for tones, their function is to mark contrast, emphasis or implication on the part of the speaker.

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