Intonation und Bedeutung. Frageintonationen im italiano regionale von Bergamo.

In this paper we analyse the role of intonation in question activities. By examining a set of spontaneous speech data in the italiano regionale of Bergamo, we show how intonation contributes to the construction of conversational meaning. Our analysis, which bases on the autosegmental metric model and on the German Interactional Prosody Research (Interaktionale Prosodieforschung), focuses on nuclear intonation contours. Starting from the formal distinction between nuclear intonation patterns with low and high accent tones, we show that the intonation of questions does not correlate with their syntactic structure, but rather with their epistemic status and their communicative function.