2017 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 1-11
The aim of this paper is to clarify the relationships among the phrase final tones of questioning utterances, the pragmatic factor, and the linguistic factor. We extracted questioning utterances from 54 conversations by 25 speakers and classified them according to the degree of information request and the sentence final particles. Tones were classified into the five tones based on its acoustic features. The main findings of the study are shown as below. The relationships between the rising tone and the pragmatic factor are coordinating. The relationships between the rising tone and the linguistic factor are complementary.
