Abstract
Falling tone is chiefly used in WH-interrogatives, which means neutral for the attitude of the speaker. The present paper focuses on the rising tone in WH-interrogatives. Rising tone adds the attitudinal meaning to the utterances. The core meaning of rising tone is to show much interest in the people or the objects of emotion, such as sympathy, surprise, doubt, and so on. I classify the rising elements into 7 types: 1-4 are major types (i. e. high rise and low rise), 5-7 are minor ones (i. e. fall-rise and fall + rise). The description is made in each type related to the attitudinal meanings, then the differences among the 7 tone types are also compared. We must take into account the fact that the problem of labels (= attitudinal names) and the attitudinal function of English intonation have an important part in the teaching of spoken English for the EFL students.
