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<Paper uid="W97-1205">
  <Title>Can pitch accent type convey information status in yes-no questions?</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="32" end_page="32" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this dialogue corpus study, we have observed that conversational game move types do not necessarily have a specific intonation contour; CHECKS and ALIGNS may have either of two distinct types of pitch accent.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> QUERIES and OBJECTS have the same pitch accent, but differ in other parameters. However, we have found that pitch accent type retlects the degree to which the speaker believes whether the current question contains shared material. Where the speaker is lacking in confidence as to whether the material is old or not, the same pitch accent, L+H*, accompanied by reaccenting of post-focal material, is used as when it is totally new. The fact that OBJECTS contain repeated lexical material, although they pattern with utterances referring to new information, is explained by the fact that this repeated material is considered to be erroneously regarded as shared with the interlocutor. null It therefore appears that speakers do not use pitch accent type to distinguish between totally new and possibly new material, but that they do distinguish between those cases and ones where they are reasonably confident that material is old. Further research using perceptual testing is planned to confirm this hypohesis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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