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Chapter 4The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
Ulrike Gut and Stefanie Pillai
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015E. Delais-Roussarie et al. (eds.), Prosody and Language in Contact, Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-45168-7_4
U. Gut ()Universität Münster, Münster, Germanye-mail: [email protected]
S. PillaiUniversity of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysiae-mail: [email protected]
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 syn-tactically 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.
4.1 Introduction
The term intonation refers to the linguistic use of pitch and pitch movements in a systematic, language-specific way to convey post-lexical meanings (e.g. Ladd 1996; Hirst and Di Cristo 1998). This means that, in intonation languages such as English, pitch movements have a phonological, meaning-distinguishing function on the level above the word but do not change the meaning of individual words as
52 U. Gut and S. Pillai
in tone languages. Examples (1a) and (1b) show two English utterances that differ only in their intonation and have different meanings:
(1a) This is your new\cat
(1b)/This is your new cat
If utterance (1a) is produced with a falling pitch movement starting on cat, it has the meaning of a statement, but if the same utterance is produced with a rising pitch movement starting on this it has the meaning of a question expressing surprise (1b).
Previous studies have shown that second language (L2) speakers have difficul-ties with selecting appropriate intonation contours for sentences (e.g. He et al. 2012) and that their usage of pitch can show cross-linguistic influence (e.g. Gut 2009). Lim (2009), for example, demonstrated that ethnically Chinese Singaporeans pro-duce tones from the tone language Chinese on some particles when speaking Eng-lish. Moreover, their intonation in English consists of sustained tone movements rather than pitch contour movements, which was also interpreted as a prosodic con-tact phenomenon. Likewise, Gut (2005) proposed that Nigerians who have a tone language as their first language (L1) show cross-linguistic influence in their L2 English: Firstly, it has a reduced inventory of pitch movements compared to British English; and secondly, high and low pitch on syllables seem to be used mainly for the function of accentuation. Furthermore, the domain of pitch appears to be the word rather than the utterance in Nigerian English.
It is the aim of this study to explore further the result of the contact of two sys-tems of linguistic use of intonation in bilingual speakers. In particular, it tries to shed more light on the questions of which aspects of English intonation are suscep-tible to cross-linguistic influence and which are not, and of what the features of the resulting contact system are. This chapter is concerned with Malaysian speakers of English. Malaysia is a highly multilingual country in which 137 different languages are spoken. In the late eighteenth century, the British established their presence in Malaysia, where they used English as a language of administration and founded English medium schools during their colonial rule. After independence in 1957, Malay was proclaimed the national language and replaced English as the language of public administration as provided for in Article 152 of the Federal Constitution and the National Language Act 1963/1967. In the education system, Malay, Chinese (Mandarin), Tamil and English medium schools exist, the latter restricted to numer-ous private and international primary and secondary schools. Today, English con-tinues to be used in the business domain and is widely used in both print and social media. The present study focuses on English spoken by Malaysians with Malay as their first language. Its aim is to explore potential cross-linguistic influence of the intonational systems of these speakers. To this end, some functions of intonation, namely the marking of information seeking in various types of questions will be investigated. The next section describes the intonation of questions in English and discusses previous studies on the question intonation of English spoken by second language (L2) learners. The subsequent sections present our study, in which we investigate how the various types of questions are marked by intonation both in the English produced by L1 Malay speakers and in Malay, as well as the discussion of our results.
534 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
4.2 Question Intonation in English
The function of pitch and pitch movements in English and their relationship with linguistic meaning can be analysed on different levels, for example the grammati-cal, the attitudinal and the discoursal. The grammatical meaning of intonation, for instance, is reflected in specific pitch movements that differentiate sentence types such as statements and interrogatives (see 1a and 1b above). In addition, pitch movements can be used by speakers to convey specific attitudes such as incredulity or disgust. If utterance (1b) is produced with a rising pitch movement that starts fairly low and ends very high, this typically signals the speaker’s surprise. More-over, intonation in English is used in discourse to indicate the relationship between utterances and to manage interactive communication between speakers. Speakers, for example, use a falling tone at the end of an utterance to signal the end of their turn (e.g. Wichmann 2000), while speakers use high pitch at the beginning of a new turn (Mindt 2001, p. 100).
These functions interact in the system of question intonation in English. When seen from a pragmatic point of view, questions, if not employed in exam or quiz situations, have a common discoursal function. They typically ‘indicate informa-tional needs on the side of one participant that should be satisfied by a conversa-tional move of the other’ (Krifka 2007, p. 17). Various types of questions can be identified on syntactic grounds: wh-questions that have a wh-word and subject-verb inversion as in (2), yes–no questions that have subject-verb inversion as in (3) and tag-questions with an auxiliary and a pronoun as in (4).
(2) What are you doing here(3) Is this true(4) Nice weather isn’t it
Moreover, utterances such as (5) and (1b) above with declarative form can also function as questions.
(5) Okay
Various researchers have suggested that specific pitch movements are associ-ated with these different syntactic types of questions. For the declarative ques-tions in (5) and (1b), intonation has been claimed to be most important, and Wells (2006, p. 52 f.) proposes that these questions are typically produced with a rising pitch movement. According to Halliday (1967, p. 23), Ladd (1996), Wells (2006, p. 42 ff.), Halliday and Greaves (2008, p. 116 f.) and O’Connor and Arnold (1973, p. 54, 64), wh-questions typically have a falling tone while yes–no questions have a rising tone. Tag questions have a rising intonation when the speaker is genuinely asking for information, but a fall when the speaker expects that the other speaker will agree (Wells 2006, p. 48 f.).
Further types of question have been identified on pragmatic or attitudinal grounds. These include echo questions, with which a speaker asks the other to re-peat what was just said as in (6).
(6) A: I’m off to Brown’sB: Where are you off to
54 U. Gut and S. Pillai
Halliday (1967, p. 23) and O’Connor and Arnold (1973, p. 59), moreover, propose that these types of echo question are typically produced with a rising pitch move-ment that starts on the wh-word (see also Wells 2006, p. 55). Types of question Hal-liday (1967, p. 26) refer to as demand questions as in example (7).
(7) Did you now
with the pragmatic meaning of I insist on knowing what exactly you did, conversely, are produced with a fall.
These claims about the typical intonation of these different types of question have been largely substantiated in empirical studies (e.g. Geluykens 1988; Hirsch-berg 2000; Hedberg and Sosa 2002; Hedberg et al. 2004). In American English tele-phone conversations between friends, Hedberg et al. (2004) observed that wh-ques-tions were associated with a falling tone in 82 % of all cases. Those wh-questions that were produced with a rise were interpreted to signal that the speakers know that they should be aware of the answer but forgot it. Yes–no questions with verb inversion were produced with a rising tone in 80 % of all cases (but see Geluykens (1988), who analysed spontaneous conversations in standard British English and found that only 52.5 % of them were produced with a rising pitch movement). Hed-berg et al. (2004) proposed that yes–no questions that were produced with falls indicated the speaker’s relative certainty of the answer. Similarly, Hedberg et al. (2004) found that 82 % of all questions with declarative sentence grammar have a rising pitch movement. Short declarative phrases used as questions such as in (5) have a rising tone in 85.7 % of all cases (Geluykens 1988, p. 572).
Little is known yet about the use of intonation on English questions by bilingual speakers. Ramirez Verdugo (2002) found that Spanish L2 speakers of English show little difference in their use of intonation in read out wh-questions and yes–no ques-tions, marking the former with falls and the latter with rises like native English speakers. However, the L2 speakers overused rises in tag questions compared to native speakers. This was also found by Hewings (1995), who asked English na-tive speakers as well as Korean, Indonesian and Greek learners of English to read out a scripted dialogue containing one tag question. While the native speakers all produced a fall, ten out of the 12 L2 learners produced a rise. Similarly, in the wh-question Which one will you go for? five learners produced a rising pitch movement.
The first indication of cross-linguistic influence on L2 intonation comes from a study by Wennerstrom (1994), who compared the pitch height at the end of a yes–no question in a reading passage produced by native English speakers to that produced by Thai, Japanese and Spanish L2 speakers of English. The Thai native speakers did not mark the question with a high ending rise as the native English speakers did, while the other two learner groups produced rises like the native speakers. Wenner-strom (1994, p. 417), speculated that these differences between L2 speakers might be due to L1 influences, and specifically ‘the fact that in Thai, a tone language, pitch functions to distinguish lexical rather than discourse meaning’.
Goh (2001) reports a high frequency of rising tones in questions produced by both Malay and Singaporean speakers of English, whereas Lim (2002) found that while the overall intonation contours of the question Where are you going? was
554 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
similar among Malay, Indian and Chinese Singaporeans, there were differences in pitch alignment on the final lexical item. Whilst all three groups displayed a final rise-fall contour, the F0 peak was found to occur much later for the Malay speakers. Although Lim does not suggest that this is due to the influence of Malay, she does indicate that this phenomenon may be a distinguishing factor of interethnic varia-tion in Singapore English.
So far, no study has analysed spontaneous language productions to analyse the intonation system of L2 speakers (but see Williams 1990, who analysed the ques-tion syntax of Singaporean L2 speakers of English in spontaneous conversations). It is the aim of this study to provide first data on the prosodic marking of spontane-ously produced questions in order to investigate possible cross-linguistic influence and contact phenomena in this linguistic area. To this end, the intonation of different types of question produced in spontaneous dialogues will be investigated both in Malay and in the English produced by native speakers of Malay.
Malay (Bahasa Melayu) belongs to the Austronesian language family and is spo-ken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and East Timor. Standard Malay, which is based on the ‘Johor-Riau Malay’ dialect is a prestigeous dialect that is widely used in the mass media and school. Like English, Malay has wh-questions as in examples (8) and (9) and tag questions as in (10) and (11). Unlike in English, utterances can be marked as questions by using the particle –kah (12) (Omar and Subbiah 1995, p. 68; Kader 1981). Cole and Hermon (1998, p. 224) describe three possible structures of wh-questions in Malay: ‘wh that is moved to its position of understood scope, wh-in situ, and partially moved wh’. Thus, in wh-questions, the wh-word can appear at the beginning or the end of the question as in (8) and (9) re-spectively. Equally, tags can occur in utterance final position (for example, bukan in example 10 or its short form kan (literal: not), see Kow 1995) or in utterance initial position such as ada (literal: is it the case) in example (11):
(8)Apakahmaknaintonasi[Whatisthemeaningofintonation?](9)Cakapdengansiapa[Speakingwithwhom?](10)DiadariPenang,bukan[SheisfromPenang,isn’tshe?](11)Adanampakbelahkanan[Canyouseeontheright?](12)Diabolehkahpakaikasutitu[Canheusetheshoes?]
No systematic studies have yet been carried out on the prosodic marking of these different types of question. Hassan (2005) describes Malay wh-questions as having a flat intonation, and Kader (1981, p. 166) claims that questions with the question particle –kah have a final rising pitch. Similarly, for Manado Malay spoken in North Sulawesi, Stoel (2005) proposes that wh-questions typically have a falling pitch movement. Kader (1981, p. 7) states that ‘if –kah is deleted in a yes–no question, the questioned constituent receives an emphatic stress (or higher pitch)’ and gives the examples (13a) and (13b) (Kader 1981, p. 166):
(13a)Diabolehkahpakaikasutitu[Canheusetheshoes?](13b)DiaBOLEHpakaikasutitu[Hecanusetheshoes?]
Like in English, declarative utterances in Malay can also function as questions when they are marked prosodically with rising pitch movements (Omar and Subbiah 1995,
56 U. Gut and S. Pillai
p. 68), as illustrated in (14) and (15). Gussenhoven (2002, p. 49) furthermore claims that ‘Malay distinguishes statements from questions by having an initial boundary % L in the former and % H in the latter’.
(14)Nama/encik[literal:Nameyour](15)Dia/datang[literal:Hecome](Hassan2005, p. 189)
Due to the less restricted word order in Malay, inversion appears not to be a compul-sory element of any type of question. However, Abdul Wahab (1981, p. 10) suggests that there are different intonation patterns when there is an inversion in a sentence as shown in (16a) and (16b):
The major differences between the English and the Malay system of marking ques-tions syntactically, thus, are the possibility of forming questions with a particle in Malay, which does not exist in English, and the possibility of forming a yes–no question with inversion in English, which does not exist in Malay.
In order to examine the possible influence of Malay question intonation on the English question intonation used by Malay speakers, this study seeks to address the following questions:
1. What type of intonation patterns are produced by the Malay speakers with differ-ent types of question produced in spontaneous dialogues in English? In particu-lar, we expect rises on wh-questions and tag questions, if Hewings’ (1995) and Ramirez Verdugo’s (2002) findings apply to all L2 speakers of English, as well as variable prosodic marking of yes–no questions.
2. To what extent is there evidence of cross-linguistic influence from Malay in the English intonation patterns produced by the Malay speakers?
4.3 Method
4.3.1 Participants and Procedure
The data were collected in two separate studies involving a Map Task (see Appendix 1). A Map Task was chosen because it allows the effective collection of spontaneously produced questions of various types. Ten L1 Malay speakers of
574 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
English participated in the first study. Three of the speakers were male and seven fe-male; their mean age was 18.8 years. All of them spoke Malay without any regional influence and were students at the University of Malaya, where they use English regularly. Five of them claimed to speak English ‘well’, five rated their ability as ‘not well’, but no difference between the these two groups was found for the pro-sodic marking of intonation. It is possible that the self-rating reflects modesty as much as actual ability. None of them spoke any other L2s apart from English.
In the second study, ten Malay speakers (one male, nine females with a mean age of 26.2 years) were recorded when participating in the same Map Task (see Ap-pendix 2). There was no dialectal influence on their speech; none of them had any regional Malay dialect as their first language as all the speakers grew up and had lived in the Central and Southern regions of Kuala Lumpur. Both groups of partici-pants were recorded in a quiet room at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.
The imbalance of the two genders in the two groups of participants reflects the unequal representation of male and female students at the Faculty of Languages. As we did not intend to analyse the possible sociolinguistic differences in question intonation, we did not consider this as disadvantageous. Equally, the slight age dif-ference between the two participant groups is not considered to influence the results in any way.
4.3.2 Data and Analysis
The participants did the Map Task in pairs. The two participants were seated op-posite each other but with a visual obstacle between them that prevented them from seeing each other. Both participants were given a map that contained various land-marks (see Appendices 1 and 2), one of which contained a route. The participant that received the map with the route was given the task to instruct the other speaker in drawing the route on their map. The maps differed according to the number and names of some of the landmarks as well as their position, which prompted utter-ances requesting information or seeking clarification or confirmation. Out of all the utterances that were produced by the two speakers in each of the ten Map Tasks, those that were selected were the ones that fitted into Freed’s (1994, p. 626 ff.) question taxonomy. For the English data, 138 questions and for the Malay data 121 questions were thus identified. All questions were subsequently classified according to their function into:
• Externalquestions(includingquestionsthataskforpublicandsocialinforma-tion and those that seek to obtain information on the physical environment or the physical participation of the conversation partners)
• Talkquestions(askingforclarification,repetitionorconfirmationofpreviouslyuttered information)
• Relationalquestions(suchasthoseseekingtoestablishtheexistenceofsharedinformation and questions that a speaker produces in order to check whether the hearer is following)
58 U. Gut and S. Pillai
• Expressivequestions (including rhetorical questions, humorousquestions andself-directed questions)
The sound huh produced by two of the speakers, although having question function, was excluded from analysis due to its lack of syntactic form. All English questions were classified into five types according to their syntactic form:
• Yes–noquestionswithverbinversionsuchaserm is there forest there• Questionswithawh-wordasforexampleerm what do you mean straight straight• Tagquestionsasforexampleit has a picture right• Utteranceswithdeclarativesyntaxsuchaserm fenced meadow is | at the south
of the monument, some consisting of a phrase only such as to the right• Single-wordutterancesasforexamplefarmland
The Malay questions were classified according to their syntactic form into:
• Questionswithawh-wordasforexamplekat mana (near where)• Tagquestionsasforexampletak nampak rumah terbiar ya (can’t see the aban-
doned house yes)• Questionswith-kah such as adakah awak nampak ladang kat situ (do you see a
farm there)• Alternativequestionssuchke kanan ke ke kiri (to the right or to the left)• Utteranceswithdeclarativesyntaxsuchassebelum jumpa tugu (before finding
the monument)• Single-wordutterancesasforexamplehutan (forest)
Furthermore, for all 259 questions the type of nuclear pitch accent was analysed with a combined auditory-instrumental method using Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2009). For this, the pitch track supplied by Praat was taken to confirm the auditory analysis carried out by the first author, who is trained in auditory intonation analy-sis. All nuclear pitch accents were thus classified into falling, rising, falling-rising, rising-falling and level tones, and transcribed following the British tradition (e.g. O’Connor and Arnold 1973).
4.4 Results
Figure 4.1 shows the percentage of the different functional types of question that were produced in both the Malay and the Malay English Map Tasks. Due to the nature of the task, not all types of questions occurred that are included in Freed’s (1994) functional taxonomy, as this was developed based on conversations between friends with unrestricted topics. The bulk of all questions in both languages consist of what Freed (1994) defined as talk questions that seek to clarify, confirm or repeat information. They make up 76.1 % of all questions that were produced in the Malay English Map Tasks and 54.5 % of all questions in the Malay data. Relational ques-tions that have the function of establishing shared information are more frequent in the Malay English than in the Malay data, while external questions are more
594 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
frequent in the Malay Map Tasks (X2 = 27.048; df = 3; p < 0.001). No questions clas-sified as expressive style occurred.
Fewer questions were produced by the person explaining the route on the map, the leader, than the follower in both languages. When speaking English, the Map Task leaders produced 28.9 % of all questions; in Malay the percentage is 27.2 %. Their respective role is further associated with a different choice of questions in both languages: leaders produce mainly external questions (45 % of all their ques-tions in English and 63.7 % of all their questions in Malay). In contrast to the Ma-lay-speaking leaders, however, the Malay English-speaking leaders produce a large amount of relational questions (32.5 %) too, as shown in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 further illustrates that in both languages, followers do not produce any relational questions, but mainly questions seeking for clarification and con-firmation. The number of external questions produced by the Malay followers is higher than that produced by their English-speaking counterparts (X2 = 31.3; df = 3; p < 0.001). Logistic regression analyses carried out in R showed for the Malay data thatleadersaresignificantlymorelikelytoproducefalls( p < 0.01) and followers aresignificantlymorelikelytoproducerises( p < 0.01).
Table 4.1 Percentage of types of question produced by the leaders and followers in the map tasksClarification Confirmation Repetition External Relational
Leader English 12.5 7.5 2.5 45 32.5Leader Malay 12.1 21.2 – 63.7 3Follower English 48 37.8 7.1 7.1 –Follower Malay 30.7 30.7 – 38.6 –
Fig. 4.1 Percentage of functional types of question according to Freed (1994) that were produced in the Malay English and the Malay map tasks
60 U. Gut and S. Pillai
A comparison of the syntactic form of the questions produced in both Map Tasks shows that fewer Malay questions are unmarked by morphosyntactic or lexical means or by question words (31.4 %) than Malay English questions, where the pro-portion of syntactically unmarked questions lies at 65.2 % (see Fig. 4.2). Logistic regression analyses showed that for the Malay English data, leaders are signifi-cantly more likely to produce rises when their utterance is not marked as a question ( p < 0.05). Conversely, tag questions and wh-questions are more frequently pro-duced in Malay than in Malay English.
There are four cases of direct borrowing in the Malay English data: in two cases a Malay question word is used (see examples 17 and 18), and in two cases a tag is used that was borrowed into Malaysian English from Chinese (examples 19 and 20).
(17) apa (what)\what (speaker 7)(18) apa tu (what’s that) big\/fence (speaker 14)(19) up ah (speaker 10)(20) to the West Lake lah (speaker 10)
Table 4.2 gives an overview of the proportion of rising, falling-rising, falling, ris-ing-falling and level pitch nuclei produced by the Malay speakers of English on the different types of question. While single-word utterances and yes–no questions with inversion are strongly associated with final rising intonation, all other question types occur variably with rises and falls. The syntactically unmarked questions (de-claratives and single-word questions) have a rising intonation in 66.7 % of all cases.
Compared to native speakers of English, the Malay speakers of English produce an equal amount of rises on single-word questions (85.7 %, Geluykens 1988, p. 572) and on yes–no questions with inversion (80 %, Hedberg et al. 2004). By contrast, questions with declarative form have fewer rises in Malay English than in American English and wh-questions have fewer falls and more rises in Malay English than in American English (82 % falls in American English, Hedberg et al. 2004).
Fig. 4.2 Relative frequency (in percentages) of different syntactic types of question produced in the Malay and Malay English map tasks
614 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
Compared to Malay (see Table 4.3), there are fewer rises on both declarative and wh-questions in the English of the Malay speakers. In Malay, of the ‘unmarked’ questions with declarative syntax, 74.1 % are produced with rising intonation. Like-wise, wh-questions show a strong preference for rising nuclei with 80 %, as do single-word questions and questions with -kah, while tag questions are produced with an equal amount of rising and falling nuclei.
Table 4.4 displays the nuclear tones that were produced on the different types of functional questions in the Malay English data. The Malay speakers of English dis-tinguish questions seeking for clarification from those asking for confirmation by producing primarily rising nuclei (rises and fall-rises) with the former but a roughly equal amount of falling and rising nuclei with the latter. The logistic regression analyses suggested a near significant relationship between the function of a ques-tion as a request for confirmation and its association with a fall (p = 0.054). Like-wise, requests for repetition are equally often marked by falling and rising nuclei.
Table 4.2 Percentage of different nuclear tones produced on the various syntactic types of ques-tion in the Malay English map tasks
Rise Fall-rise Fall Rise-fall Level nDeclarative 52.5 6.6 31.1 4.9 4.9 61One word 62.1 20.7 13.8 – 3.4 29Yes–no question 80 5 15 – – 20Wh-question 33.3 6.7 53.3 – 6.7 15Tag question 38.5 7.7 46.1 7.7 – 13
Table 4.3 Percentage of different nuclear tones produced on the various syntactic types of ques-tion in the Malay map tasks
Rise Fall-rise Fall Rise-fall Level nDeclarative 51.9 22.2 22.2 3.7 – 27One word 54.5 18.2 18.2 – 9.1 11Question with particle 92.8 – 0.8 – – 14Wh-question 80 – 15 5 – 20Tag question 50 9.1 29.5 11.4 – 44Alternative question – 20 60 20 – 5
Table 4.4 Nuclear tones produced on the different types of functional question in the Malay Eng-lish map tasks
Rise Fall-rise Fall Rise-fall Level nClarification 61.5 11.6 19.2 1.9 5.8 52Confirmation 35 15 45 2.5 2.5 40Repetition 37.5 12.5 50 – – 8External 60 – 28 8 4 25Relational 92.3 – 0.7 – – 13
62 U. Gut and S. Pillai
The majority of relational questions are produced with rises by the Malay speakers of English, while in external questions there is a slight tendency to mark them with a final rise.
Like in English, Malay speakers prefer to produce external questions with ris-es (see Table 4.5). In contrast to Malay English, however, they produce clarifica-tion and confirmation questions with an equal amount of rises (70.9 and 73.5 % respectively).
One further difference between Malay and Malay English becomes apparent when comparing the association of final pitch movements with both syntactic type and functional question type (see Table 4.6). While questions with declarative form are used primarily as clarification and confirmation questions in both languages, Malay speakers of English use wh-questions predominantly for the purpose of asking for clarification, whereas Malay speakers use them as questions asking for external, i.e. public information.
Table 4.7 illustrates that Malay speakers of English make a prosodic distinction between wh-questions that have an utterance-initial wh-word as in (21) and wh-questions that have an utterance-final wh-word as in (22). This is independent of
Table 4.5 Nuclear tones produced on the different types of question in the Malay map tasksRise Fall-rise Fall Rise-fall Level n
Clarification 58.1 12.9 15.8 – 3.2 31Confirmation 50 23.5 20.6 5.9 – 34External 65.4 1.9 21.8 10.9 – 55Relational – – 100 – – 1
Table 4.6 Percentage of declarative and wh-questions used as clarification, confirmation, rela-tional and external questions in the Malay English and Malay map tasks
Malay English MalayDeclarative Wh-question Declarative Wh-question
Clarification 40 64.3 37 10Confirmation 48 – 44.4 –Relational 5 – – –External 7 35.7 18.6 90
Table 4.7 Percentage of rising and falling nuclei on wh-questions produced with initial, medial and final wh-word in Malay English and in Malay
Rise/fall-rise Fall/rise-fall Level nMalay English
Initial wh-word 25 75 – 8Final wh-word 57.1 28.6 14.3 7
Malay Initial wh-word 100 – – 8Medial wh-word 100 – – 4Final wh-word 50 50 – 8
634 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
the functional usage of the wh-question because both wh-word initial questions and wh-word final questions are used predominantly as clarification questions (62.5 and 71.4 % respectively) in Malay English.
(21) erm what do you mean\straight\straight (speaker 6)(22) erm from cottage go go/where (speaker 10)
Another difference between the Malay English and the Malay prosodic marking of questions can be seen in declarative questions (see Table 4.8). While declaratives with a falling tone are used with the function of confirmation question and declara-tives with rising nuclei tend to be used as clarification questions in Malay English, no such association exists in Malay.
4.5 Discussion
Our data show that language status influences the types of question that are pro-duced in a Map Task. Twice as many questions that are syntactically unmarked are produced in the L2 English than in the L1 Malay data. Moreover, followers in the Map Tasks ask for repetition of a previous utterance only when using their L2. When the Malay speakers speak to each other in their L2 English, the leaders ask a large amount of relational questions that seek to establish the existence of shared in-formation and that check whether the hearer is following the information exchange. When speaking in their native language, conversely, Malay leaders in the Map Task do not seem to feel the need for relational questions.
The results of our study demonstrate that the usage of prosody on questions by Malay speakers of English is rule-governed: questions consisting of a single word and yes–no questions with inversion are systematically marked by rising nuclei. Furthermore, wh-questions with an utterance-initial wh-word are consistently pro-duced with falls, while wh-questions with an utterance-final wh-word are produced with rises. Malay speakers of English, moreover, distinguish different functional types of question prosodically: both clarification and relational questions are as-sociated with rising nuclei. Clarification questions are thus prosodically distinct from confirmation questions in the English of L1 Malay speakers. These findings are, however, all based on a fairly small database and await confirmation on a much larger data set.
Table 4.8 Percentage of declaratives with falling and rising nuclei used as the different functional type of question in Malay English and in Malay
Confirmation Clarification External Relational Repetition nMalay English
Fall 77.3 9.1 9.1 – 4.5 22Rise 27.8 58.3 5.6 8.3 – 36
Malay Fall 33.3 50 16.7 – – 6Rise 47.6 33.3 19 – – 21
64 U. Gut and S. Pillai
How can the Malay speakers’ prosodic system of question marking in their L2 English be characterised? It appears that it contains some elements of the prosodic system of the target language English: like British English speakers (Geluykens 1988, p. 572), Malay speakers of English produce rises in more than 80 % of all cas-es on short phrases and single words that are used as questions. Like the American English speakers investigated by Hedberg et al. (2004), they produce rises in more than 80 % of the cases on yes–no questions with inversion and falls on wh-questions with an initial wh-word. In contrast to native speakers of English though, Malay speakers of English produce more falls on questions with declarative form and pro-duce overall more rises on wh-questions (thus contradicting Hassan’s 2005 claims).
Can these differences be explained by cross-linguistic influence from Malay? In Malay, declarative questions are associated with rises in more than 74 % of all cases, and thus, more so than in the English questions produced by Malay speakers. Cross-linguistic influence, therefore, cannot play a role here; rather the Malay English speakers’ interlanguage rule of marking clarification questions with rising nuclei is likely to lead to this prosodic difference from the target language system. In the case of wh-questions, these are marked consistently by rises in Malay so that direct cross-linguistic influence from the L1 system might be at play here. However, rising nuclei on wh-questions were also observed by Hewings (1995) for Korean, Indone-sian and Greek speakers of English and Singaporean English speakers, who tended to use a rising tone for wh-questions (Goh 1995, 2001), and might thus constitute some type of universal feature of L2 English. Yet, we consider another explanation, that of a complex indirect cross-linguistic influence, the most likely one. The over-use of rises on wh-questions was only found for those that had an utterance-final wh-word. These questions also exist in native English and are sometimes used as so-called echo questions such as in example (23).
(23) A: I robbed a bankB: You did/what
with which a speaker repeats the immediately preceding utterance of their conversa-tion partner as a request to repeat the information or in order to express incredulity (e.g. Halliday 1967, p. 23). The wh-questions with utterance-final wh-word in our data are not of this kind; rather, we suspect that they are a result of the cross-linguis-tic influence in the form of a transfer of a permissible wh-question word order in Malay. Thus, it appears that on wh-questions with a ‘Malay’ word order, the default Malay intonation pattern of a rise (Abdul Wahab 1981; Gussenhoven 2002, p. 49) is produced too.
The Malay speakers of English investigated here show some differences from other L2 English speakers. In contrast to Govindan and Pillai (2009) who found a frequent use of tags in yes–no questions in written colloquial English produced by Indian Malaysians that was attributed to the influence of Malay (see example 24), the participants of the MapTasks produced few tag questions when speaking English.
(24)Alreadytoldherornot?[Sudahberitahudiaketidak?]
Furthermore, they did not show an overuse of rises on tag questions as observed by Hewings (1995) and Ramirez Verdugo (2002). This difference, however, might
654 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
be due to the fact that in those two studies the tag questions always employed tags with auxiliaries such as isn’t it, while most of the tags produced in the Map Tasks consisted of right, which is a similar finding to Govindan and Pillai (2009). In the current study, the use of right can be attributed to the speaking context because in most cases it is the leader who uses the right tag.
4.6 Conclusion
This study has shown that there is a preference for different types of question forms in Malay English and Malay, and that different prosodic patterns can be ascribed to different question functions (e.g. a preference for rising nuclei for questions seeking clarification compared to those asking for confirmation).
This chapter also described the intonation patterns of different question forms in the English spoken by L1 Malay speakers and compared them to patterns used in Malay. There was generally a preference for a rising intonation in the English ques-tion forms produced by the Malay speakers in single-word, yes–no and utterance-final wh-word questions. There was also a similar preference for both clarification and relational questions.
In some cases, it could be posited that there was possible L1 influence on the use of intonation on a particular type of question form, an example of this being wh-questions that tend to be marked with a rise, although this appears to be a common pattern with non-native speakers of English. Further, the frequent use of rises on wh-questions was more apparent in the English questions with utterance-final wh-words which were not echo questions, but had a word order permissible in Malay.
The findings reported in this chapter are preliminary in nature, and the size of the data totalling approximately an hour of speech, make it difficult to interpret our data conclusively. The setting of a Map Task, furthermore, restricted the type of ques-tions produced by the participants. In a follow-up study, the question intonation pro-duced in other speaking contexts such as informal conversations should be analysed in order to confirm our first results. Likewise, controlled data elicitation methods would allow the collection of particular types of question. For example, a pattern of use that would be especially interesting to investigate further is the intonation used in utterance-final wh-words in Malay English and Malay.
4.7 Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Robert Fuchs for his assistance with the logistic regression analy-ses and to our two reviewers for their helpful comments.
This article was written while the first author was an External Senior Research Fellow at the Freiburg Research Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), whose sup-port she gratefully acknowledges. Part of the data was collected during the first
66 U. Gut and S. Pillai
author’s tenure as visiting Professor at the University of Malaya. The study was supported in part by a University of Malaya grant (RG220-11HNE).
4.8 Appendix 1
Map Task for the Malay speakers of English, taken from <http://cyberpsychology.eu/>
674 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
4.9 Appendix 2
Map Task for the Malay speakers of Malay
694 The Question Intonation of Malay Speakers of English
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