The intonation of the Icelandic other-initiated repair expressions Ha ‘Huh’ and Hvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu ‘What do/did you say’

Abstract

It has been shown in the literature that cross-linguistically, the other-initiated repair element ‘huh’ is typically realised with rising intonation. Icelandic has exceptional status in this respect in that it has falling intonation with Ha [haː] ‘huh’. The literature claims that it is language-specific interrogative prosody that accounts for this exceptional status of Icelandic. More specifically, it argues that falling intonation is the default for questions in Icelandic and that the other-initiated repair interjection shares its intonational features with interrogatives. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, using map-task data, it confirms previous results for the intonation of Icelandic Ha, and in addition shows that its more complex relative Hvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu ‘What do/did you say?’ is realised with falling intonation as well. Both expressions are realised with an H* pitch accent followed by downward pitch movement to L%. Secondly, the paper argues, for a number of reasons, against the assumption that question prosody is enough to account for the Icelandic pattern, and it suggests instead that Ha and Hvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu are in fact not specifically marked in intonation, but are realised with a combination of pitch accent and boundary tone found across utterance types in Icelandic.