Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to our knowledge about the prosodic realisation of rhetorical questions (RQs) as compared to information-seeking questions (ISQs). It reports on a production experiment testing the prosody of Englishwh-and polar RQs and ISQs in a Canadian variety. In previous literature, the contribution of prosody to the distinction between the two illocution types has often been limited to the intonational realisation of the terminus of the utterance, i.e. whether it ends in a rise or a fall. Along with edge tones, we tested other phonological and phonetic parameters. Our results are as follows: (i) The intonational terminus was distinctive only for polar questions (rise vs plateau), not forwh-questions (low throughout). (ii) Moreover, the semantic difference between RQs and ISQs is signalled by pitch accents. It is reflected in nuclear pitch accent type forwh-questions, and accent type and position for polar questions. (iii) Phonetically, RQs are produced with longer constituent durations and – forwh-questions – a softer voice quality in thewh-word. Taken together, several intonational categories and phonetic parameters contribute to the distinction between RQs and ISQs. A simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is in any case insufficient.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".