Checking

Check with Interjection yes-no rise

If while you are speaking you want to check whether you have said the right thing, or whether your hearer has understood what you said, you can use an interjection such as OK? or right. These interjections are a kind of yes-no question, and are accordingly usually said with a yes-no rise:

In some varieties of English various other such interjections are used - thogh not in mainstream British standard English:

Check with Pardon-question rise

To ask another speaker to repeat something because you did not hear it properly, you can say What? or Sorry? or Pardon?, with a rise. We call this tone meaning a pardon-question rise.

With a pardon question you can query either the entire previous utterance, as in the examples just given, or just one element in it. In either case, the tone is the pardon-question rise: A typical conversational interchange might go as follows. Speaker A makes a statement, perhaps with an implicational fall-rise. Speaker B didn't quite catch it, and utters an interjection with a pardon-question rise. Speaker A repeats what he said, this time with a definitive fall: The following conversation interchange is similar. But here speaker A asks a yes-no rise question. B asks a pardon question. When A repeats his yes-no question, again he switches to an insistent fall tone:

A different kind of pardon question is please-repeat wh question, which involves changing the focused element into a question word. The tone is always a rise. In the simplest form of please-repeat wh question there is no fronting of the question word:

Alternatively the wh word maybe fronted. If so, it still bears the nucleus and has the rising tone. Any element of the first speaker's utterance may be queried in this way. The nucleus always goes on the question word: Broad-focus(see

3.9

) pardon questions request a repetition of everything the other speaker has just said. Like repetition wh questions, they have a pardon-question rise on the question word. On the other hand, if the speaker asks not for a repetition but for a clarification, we have an ordinary wh question (see

5.9

), which will most likely be said with a definitive fall: The difference between the definitive fall on a wh question and the pardon-question rise using the same syntax is seen in this pair of examples: The appropriate answers to who? in (i) is the friend's name. The appropriate answer to who? in (ii) is Sophie.

Check with Interpretation yes-no rise

To check whether you have understood the other speaker correctly, you can suggest an interpretation, to see if it is correct. This too requires a rise: it is a kind of yes-no question, and takes a yes-no rise.

Check with Echo question rise

An echo question uses some or all of the same words as used by the previous speaker, but with a pardon-question rise. This may be a simple request for repetition or clarification, or it may also express surprise and amazement at what the other speaker has said:

There may be broad focus, querying the whole of the previous speaker's utterance, or narrow focus on some particular element. In the latter case the nucleus may be placed on a different item than the one on which the previous speaker placed it, often with ellipsis of some of the words: It is also possible to query two or more words individually, placing a pardon-question rise nucleus on each: A special type of echo question is second-order question. Which echoes the other speaker's question to query it, perhaps with narrowed focus: