The pragmatic function of intonation in L2 discourse: English tag questions used by Spanish speakers

Abstract The present article discusses the pragmatic role of intonation in cross-cultural interactions. It investigates whether the choice of tone and pitch accent in the spoken discourse produced by Spanish learners of English can lead to deficient appropriateness, a concept that can be defined as the choice of ‘‘the most adequate element—where element is understood at any linguistic level—in the realization of a certain function in a specific context’’ (Romero Trillo 2001: 531). The study analyzes short read-alouds and Spanish learners’ spontaneous conversations and compares them to native English speakers’ production in order to interpret the pragmatic meaning expressed by their intonation patterns (cf. Benson et al. 1988; Halliday 1994; Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). A cross-linguistic corpus was compiled by recording native and non-native speakers who performed short dialogues in English. The corpus data were analyzed and annotated in order to obtain detailed and quantitative comparable information on the two language user groups’ prosodic characteristics. The results reveal the existence of significant differences in the choice of the tone and pitch accent by non-native and native English speakers in similar contexts. These differences may cause communicative misunderstanding.

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