Open Access

Dario Marić

• Rising-falling-rising pitch accent is perhaps the most distinctive pitch accent in the spoken German language due to its prominence and complexity. Its prominence reflects the very high degree of informational relevance of the focused word or a strong need to attract the interlocutor's attention to the utterance that follows the focused word. Up to now, rising-falling-rising pitch accent has not been a subject of research into spoken German prosody, partially due to the stylistic neutrality of utterances that are artificially generated for research purposes and are devoid of context, and partially due to the insufficient number of different types of conversations within the corpus used to analyze prosody in authentic conversations. The purpose of this study is to determine the functions of rising-falling-rising pitch accents in German conversation with regard to co-constituting speech acts, structuring conversations and expressing the modality of utterances.