Margret Selting

• After reviewing the research on Saxon regionalized intonation and giving an overview of our research project on regionalized intonation in German, a particular salient regionalized intonation contour from the Dresden vernacular is described in detail. In addition to a more widespread contour that is also used in the Berlin vernacular, albeit in different contexts, the so-called 'upward staircase contour' which is formed by a lower plateau, a rise and a higher plateau, the Dresden vernacular also uses very salient regionalized variants of such staircase contours: These variants entail upward staircases with, metaphorically speaking, two steps; i.e. after the lower plateau and the rise up to a higher plateau, the pitch rises up again in order to form a third plateau. Depending upon the alignment of the second rise and the third plateau, with only the final unaccented syllable of the intonation phrase or with the nuclear accented syllable and the following tail, the contour needs to be distinguished, yielding either an 'upward staircaseAfter reviewing the research on Saxon regionalized intonation and giving an overview of our research project on regionalized intonation in German, a particular salient regionalized intonation contour from the Dresden vernacular is described in detail. In addition to a more widespread contour that is also used in the Berlin vernacular, albeit in different contexts, the so-called 'upward staircase contour' which is formed by a lower plateau, a rise and a higher plateau, the Dresden vernacular also uses very salient regionalized variants of such staircase contours: These variants entail upward staircases with, metaphorically speaking, two steps; i.e. after the lower plateau and the rise up to a higher plateau, the pitch rises up again in order to form a third plateau. Depending upon the alignment of the second rise and the third plateau, with only the final unaccented syllable of the intonation phrase or with the nuclear accented syllable and the following tail, the contour needs to be distinguished, yielding either an 'upward staircase with an additional final rise plateau' or a 'double upward staircase'. These two contours are shown to be used in different conversational contexts and in different functions in the Dresden vernacular. - Data for this study come from natural speech by speakers of the Dresden vernacular. The phonetic and phonological analysis of the contour is based on auditive, acoustic-phonetic and phonological methodology; the functional analysis of the utterances with the salient contours relies on the techniques of conversation analysis…