Patterns of rising and falling in Australian English

The conversational speech of seventeen Australian English-speaking female adolescents was analysed to examine intonational variation in turn-internal and turnfinal contexts in spontaneous talk-in-interaction. Between 69-72% of all intonational contours analysed in the corpus had final rises, although only a small proportion of these tunes were examples of uptalk, i.e. high rising terminals associated with syntactic declarative utterances. Whilst a variety of tunes were found in turn-final contexts, speakers tended to use mid-level plateaus, high rises, and fall-rises as floorholders, whereas more final falls coincided with turn-yielding position. There were minimal differences in the spread of intonational patterns across the city and country corpora, although country speakers used marginally more uptalk than city speakers.