A qualitative analysis of rising tones in Dublin English

In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary study of the intonation system of Dublin English (DE) with a particular focus on rising tones. After analysing a corpus recorded in the framework of the PAC Program, we conclude that Dublin English has a hybrid intonation system that mixes standard English contours like falls and rises, and Northern Irish contours like rise-falls. Rising declaratives are also found (as reported by [7] and [8]), but we argue that some of these rising tones are occurrences of Uptalk and do not belong to the Urban Northern British Intonation (UNBI) that is found in Belfast. Indeed the analysis of extracts of conversations providing an ecological context makes it possible to perform a qualitative study of the interactional and pragmatic functions linked to Uptalk, and this is, as far as we know, the first study of the kind on Dublin English rising tones. We conclude that UNB rises take the form of rise-plateaus in DE. Continuation rises can be realized as rise-plateaus or low rises, while uptalk takes the form of full rises and high rises.