Language and Speech https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830917698178 Language and Speech 2017, Vol. 60(2) 224–241 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0023830917698178 journals.sagepub.com/home/las Intonation and Evidentiality in Spanish Polar Interrogatives Victoria Escandell-Vidal UNED, Madrid, Spain Abstract Three different nuclear pitch accents can be found in Castilian Spanish polar interrogatives. In addition to the ‘canonical’ low-rise pattern, there are two marked interrogative contours featuring high-rise and rise–fall pitch accents. The aim of this paper is to explain how each contour contributes to the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. I argue that this contribution is to be sought at the semantic, not at the pragmatic-illocutionary, attitudinal- level. My proposal is that the low-rise contour is the expression of unspecified sentence polarity (corresponding to the interrogative operator), whereas the two marked contours add indications about the information source—that is, they encode evidential distinctions. The high-rise pattern indicates that the Self is the source of the information; the rise–fall tone indicates that Other is the source. The whole range of pragmatic interpretations that have been described in the literature can be easily accommodated into the present proposal as inferential developments of the encoded meaning together with contextual information. This view has implications for a theory of interrogatives, for the phonology of intonation and for the articulation of the semantics/ pragmatics interface. Keywords Polar interrogatives, questions, intonation contours, evidentiality, phonology, semantics/ pragmatics interface 1 Introduction A yes/no question is a prototypical discourse category defined by an alignment of features at vari- ous levels. In Spanish, it is a polar interrogative (i.e., a root sentence with subject-verb inversion in the indicative mood) with a low-rise final contour. This structure is semantically interpreted as containing a variable for sentence polarity ranging over two pre-established values (positive and negative). Finally, the request for unknown information is its default illocutionary point (see Escandell-Vidal, 1999, for a more detailed discussion). Corresponding author: Victoria Escandell-Vidal, UNED, Senda del Rey, 7, Madrid 28040, Spain. Email: vicky@flog.uned.es 698178LAS 0 0 10.1177/0023830917698178Language and SpeechEscandell-Vidal research-article 2017 Special Section Article