It has been claimed that a sentence final tone of an interrogative sentence in Icelandic is a (global) falling tone just the same as the one of an indicative sentence, whether interrogative pronouns are involved or not. However, almost all the previous studies on the Icelandic intonation have only dealt with the interrogative sentences with a complete sentence structure. Moreover, almost no previous studies paid any scientific attention to the differences between Icelandic indicative and interrogative sentences with respect to their sentence final tones. Thus, the following two questions are still remained unsolved: i) what sort of a sentence final tone does an interrogative sentence with an incomplete sentence structure (e.g. Eitthvad fleira? ‘Anything else?’) have?; ii) are there any similarities and/or differences between indicative and interrogative sentences in terms of their sentence final tonal patterns? This paper aims at inquiring into several unsolved aspects of the Icelandic interrogative intonation and solving those two questions based on the primary data elicited through the field research conducted by the author; the following conclusions are thereby drawn: a) all the interrogative sentences in Icelandic take a falling sentence final melody, regardless of their sentence structures and whether they involve interrogative pronouns/adverbs or not. b) any remarkable tonal traits specific to either of indicative and interrogative sentences are not found through experimental phonetic investigations.
アイスランド語疑問文イントネーションの諸相
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