On only-pragmatically driven intonation change

The intonation system of the Italian variety of Pescara was documented and two sentence types (neutral polar questions and contrastive focus statements) were found to exhibit the same two pitch accents as allophonic variants by the old speakers. However, moving on the new generation, the variations of the two sentence types shows different evolutions: both variants are used, remaining distinct, for contrastive focus, whereas they mainly fuse into a “midway” pattern, when used for questions. The asymmetry can only be ascribed to the pragmatics and not to the phonetic forms of the patterns, as these were originally equal across the two sentence types. This suggests that polar questions are more kin to phonetic convergence than contrastive statements.