Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Amanda and this is our 213th episode.

We have a complicated topic about pitch and intonation today, so I'm going to jump right in. I wish I knew who gave so many

of my students the idea that all questions in English should have a rising pitch at the end.

It's just not true. Yes, no questions. Those are the questions that we can answer with a yes or a no, are more likely to end in a rising pitch than W.H. questions, but even those can have a falling pitch. For instance, I can ask, did you get my email with a rising pitch, implying a simple yes-no question and answer. Or I can ask,

did you get my email with a falling pitch, which could be implying that I expect an answer of

yes or that I'm asking for more information than yes or no? I'll talk more about that in our next episode.

W.H. Question sentences. Those are the questions that begin with the words who, what, when,

where, why, and how will typically end in a falling pitch. Since we have the question word, who, why, what,

etc. to mark the sentence as a question, we don't need pitch to also indicate that we're asking a

question. I'm going to introduce a new term here, and that's the word unmarked.

Unmarked, when I'm referring to word stress and intonation, means that the sentence has the most

neutral meaning possible. It's completely straightforward, and there's no special significance

to any part of the sentence.

Even an unmarked sentence will have some words that are stressed more than others and will

have changes in pitch during and at the end of the sentence.

So coming back to W.H. Questions, an unmarked question will have a falling pitch at the end of the

sentence. What confuses learners is that they also hear a rising pitch mid-sentence because the

content words, those are the nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are likely to be stressed.

So don't let the rise on pitch words make it impossible to hear the falling pitch at the very end of the question sentence. I'm going to say some

W.H questions in an unmarked manner. My sentence will end in a falling pitch and my final content word gets the most stress.

Where should we go for dinner?

...