The intonation of declarative-mood questions in a corpus of Hong Kong English: // ➘➚ beef ball // ➙ you like //

Abstract

In the English Department of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University we are compiling the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English. In the examination of our data we have found that the ways in which the two sets of participants (i.e. Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English) ask questions share some similarities, but also differ in a number of respects. It seems, for example, that the Hong Kong Chinese have a stronger tendency to ask questions by means of declarative-mood questions, and the intonation used to achieve this indirect question form is examined in this paper and compared with the native speakers in the data. The implications of the findings for learning and teaching the English language are explored.