Lexical intonation in Standard German

Abstract Lexical intonation in Standard German, i.e., pitch patterns related to German words, is a disputed subject. On the one hand, German is not a tone language; on the other hand, the tonal patterns of a subset of interjections, calls, and particles are salient. It is argued here that intonation patterns become associated with word meanings and thus the lexicon, which challenges the approach of post-lexical tonal phenomena usually assumed for intonation languages. The syntactic contribution to lexical intonation is the systematic occurrence of certain classes of words in either the sentence peripheries, as parenthetical structures, or as one-word sentences, in which these classes of words are intonationally detached from the rest of the utterance. The argument of lexical intonation rests on minimal pairs, which, trivially, are not derivable from syntax; therefore, the controversy is discussed through the example of hallo as a greeting particle and hallo as a sentence particle typically used by younger people. Based on the Database of Spoken German , two empirical studies on the prosodic encoding and decoding of hallo were conducted. The studies show that both the encoding and decoding of the respective function of hallo relies on pitch contours. The article concludes with the consequences of fixed tonal patterns for the share of intonation in the German lexicon.