Interjections and greetings

Default tone

The categories of interjections and exclamation partly overlap. So, not surprisingly, the default tone for interjections is an exclamatory (or definitive) fall:

Encouraging rise

However, many short interjections can be said with an encouraging rise, inviting the other person to speak or to continue speaking:

The interjection oops, whoops (uttered when you have just made a mistake or dropped something seems always to have rise (including under 'rise' its variant, the mid level see

5.7

))

In other cases a rise on an interjection signals no more than a routine acknowledgement:

Definitive fall vs Encouraging rise

The difference in meaning between a definitive fall and an encouraging rise can be seen in the following pair of examples:

The fall on right in (i) implies the potential completion of the conversational interchange, whereas the rise in (ii) can be taken by the first speaker as an invitation to issue a further conversation. It means something like 'please continue speaking'.

Not all encouraging rises on interjections means 'please continue speaking'. In the following examples the meaning is more 'please continue with your course of action':

Calling someone by name

In calling someone by name, we normally use a rise or fall-rise if trying to get their attention. A fall, on the other hand, is a straightforward greeting (or, of course, an exclamation):

Greetings

For most greetings, both falls and rises are perfectly possible and acceptable. A definitive fall is more formal, an encouraging rise more personal:

Variant (i), with a fall, means just 'I am greeting you', whereas variant (ii) , with a rise, expresses an added interest in the person addressed, 'as I greet you, I am acknowledging you'.

Vocative after Hello or Hi

A vocative after hello or hi usually has its own rising tone (see

). In this case hello may be stress-shifted (see

5.10

) so that the accent falls on the first syllable: One or wo greetings are tonally restricted. Whereas hello may have any tone, hi (if said with an ordinary tone, not stylized one; see

5.15

) can only have a fall. The same is true of hey. Likewise cheers, in its British sense of 'thank you', always has a fall:

Thank you

Said with fa fall, thank you has the straightforward meaning ' I am thanking you'; with a rise, it suggests 'as I thank you, I am acknowledging you'. This is, however, a routine kind of acknowledgment. To express genuinely gratitude, it is necessary to use af all, variant (i):

Farewell

For saying fare well, goodbye and its equivalents often have a rise. Since good-bye signals the completion of a conversational exchange, you might expect it normally to be said with a definitive fall; but in practice a rise is much more frequent. Why? Because it is an encouraging rise, expressing good will and an acknowledgement of the other person. The same applies when a television presenter signs off.

But to get rid of an unwelcome guest you would say: Strangely, the informal see you tends to have a fall-rise rather than a rise: