"Thank you": intonation

[Jim Parish]

The following question has been niggling at me for a while, and I'm
wondering if anyone on-list has any comments.

The phrase "thank you", spoken as a complete sentence, occurs with
several different intonation contours. In particular, it sometimes takes a
falling contour and sometimes a rising one. It seems to me that there
are pragmatic differences between the contexts that call for the one and
the other, but I haven't been able to devise a clear description of the
differences. (Rising contour seems to me to tend to be conversation-
final, but not always; falling contour seems more "serious", in some
sense; but I'm not willing to commit to either of these claims.)

Does anyone have any thoughts on this, or know of any research?
(One obvious question is the extent to which... whatever it is... is
special to "thank you" or is derived from general properties of rising and
falling intonation.)

Jim Parish

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