The perception approach to the study of UpTalk 
in contemporary English

The article aims to identify the functions and attitudinal modality of the High Terminal Tone (HTT) or UpTalk whose use is on the rise at the end of declarative utterances in most national and regional varieties of present-day English. The material was comprised by statements pronounced by speakers of 5 Englishes: British RP and SBE, Australian English and 2 Northern British dialects of Belfast and Newcastle. The material was obtained from local Internet radio stations and from video interviews in the open access on different media platforms. As control tokens, phrases with the intonation patterns other than the HTT were included in the material. Frequencies above 500 Hz were deleted from the acoustic signal to provide meaningless environment to make the listeners focus on intonation. Native speakers of different Englishes participated in a perceptual study listening to the modified phrases and labeling utterance and modality type. The results show that the acoustic features and the communicative functions of the HTT may differ in different accents. Phrases with the HTT were regularly identified as questions by the representatives of all 5 Englishes. The frequency of such perception depended upon a particular variety of English. The obtained results enable to conclude that the spread of UpTalk or the HTT should be accounted for by reasons other than the intra-language transfer.