On rising intonation in Balkan Slavic

Abstract

Crosslinguistic work on the meanings of intonational tunes across clause types remains rare. Rudin (2018a) notes an apparent correlation between the behavior of declarative and imperative sentences with rising terminal contours. Languages in which ‘rising declaratives’ comprise non-canonical biased questions allow for ‘rising imperatives’, interpreted as suggestions, while languages in which rising declaratives comprise canonical neutral questions disallow rising imperatives. Bulgarian and Macedonian, closely related languages which differ in the status of their rising declaratives, provide an ideal test case for investigating this correlation. Initial investigation of these two Balkan Slavic languages lends support to the prediction that rising imperatives occur only in languages whose rising declaratives are biased questions.