一般疑問句用升調?你的英語老師教錯啦 | 小強の英音課堂

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幾乎所有的中小學英語老師在講到英國英語語調的時候都會說，通常情況下一般疑問句（yes or no questions，簡稱YNQs）用升調。教科書、學術著作中也大多如此表述，比如Joseph Desmond O'Connor和Gordon Arnold在他們的Intonation of Colloquial English第二版中便說：

This is by far the most common way of asking yes-no questions; it should be regarded as the normal way, with the speaker displaying genuine interest in obtaining the information requested. Any other tone group should be used only in the special circumstances outlined in the appropriate place in this chapter.

O'connor & Arnold還說，只有在表達驚訝的一般疑問句，尤其是反問句中，才會用降升調，效果就儼然說話人幾乎不能相信自己的耳朵。

John Wells的English Intonation (Cambridge University Press, 2006)也有類似的闡述，甚至引用了O'connor & Arnold：

The default tone for a yes-no question is a rise. We call it the yes-no rise (p. 45).
Neither the mid fall-rise nor the rise-fall-rise is used with questions… The high fall-rise… adds animation or intensity and has the effect of making the question more specific. It can suggest astonishment, 'as if the speaker can hardly believe his ears' (p. 221)

可時光流轉，現今還是這樣子嗎？

語音學家Geoff Lindsey基於大量實例便認為現今RP禮貌的一般疑問句的語調範式更多是fall-rise（即降升調；Lindsey指出升的部分未必明顯，有時跟high fall，即高降調很接近且很難區分），而不是Low Bounce（O'Connor & Arnold對「低升調」的稱呼）。感興趣的朋友可通過此連結閱讀：https://dwz.cn/v4TwWz6F。

Lindsey還指出，低升的用法實則在native speakers聽來很古老，引起他們發笑：

Your reaction to those clips may depend on whether you're native or not. Non-natives may recognize the patterns as simply the way they were taught to speak English. Native Brits, on the other hand, may be chuckling at how old-fashioned (and posh) they sound – the kind of speech that natives now associate with old films like Brief Encounter.

要想印證Lindsey的判斷其實很簡單，只要找主持人講RP的訪談節目，仔細辨聽其一般疑問句的用調就可以了，比如可辨聽BBC的Hard Talk或者Al Jazeera的Head to Head節目中主持人的提問。小強在文章一開始的視頻中便引用了這樣的內容，可以點開觀看哦。

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