Abstract Many varieties of Romance show more than one intonation contour available for polar question (PQ) marking. Understanding the pragmatic licensing conditions for these contours is no easy task. Experimental work has tended to account for the variation in terms of dichotomies like information-seeking vs. confirmation-seeking or neutral vs. biased. In this paper I use production data to argue that different languages and dialects will encode different types of information intonationally in PQs, but that the type of information that we find encoded through intonation is quite similar to the type of information encoded through sentence-final particles in languages like Cantonese or Lao. These meanings lie on an epistemic gradient, and the points on the gradient that are encoded linguistically through intonation are language-specific (i.e. language X encodes meaning A, but language Y might encode meaning B, or meanings A & B, etc.). I explore three contours in Puerto Rican Spanish, their phonetic implementations, and their meanings with respect to this epistemic gradient. I argue that we should keep in mind the range of possible meanings of SFPs in other languages in order to refine our methodology in a way that allows us to make better predictions about the pragmatic division of labor among intonation contours, specifically for PQs.

中文翻译：

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解释波多黎各西班牙极地问题中的国际形式和功能

摘要许多浪漫史作品都显示出不止一种语调轮廓，可用于极地提问（PQ）标记。了解这些轮廓的实用许可条件并非易事。实验工作倾向于解释二分法的差异，例如信息寻求与确认寻求或中立与偏见。在本文中，我使用生产数据来论证，不同的语言和方言将在PQ中将不同类型的信息编码为全国性的信息，但是我们发现通过语调编码的信息的类型与通过句末修饰语编码的信息的类型非常相似以广东话或老挝语等语言提供。这些含义位于认知梯度上，并且梯度上通过语调进行语言编码的点是特定于语言的（即 语言X对含义A进行编码，但语言Y对含义B或含义A和B等进行编码）。我探讨了波多黎各西班牙语的三个轮廓，其语音实现方式以及它们对于这种认知梯度的含义。我认为，我们应该记住其他语言中SFP可能含义的范围，以便改进我们的方法，从而使我们能够更好地预测语调轮廓之间的务实分工，尤其是针对PQ。