the valley girls

I should have remembered to say though that "standard" question word order and declarative word order but with interrogative intonation tend to have somewhat different shades of meaning overall, in that sentences with question word order probably are stronger and more directed as questions, unlike ones with declarative word order (even though they're still questions).

Travis - I presume it was you who was replying to my Aus-Irish post.
True, Irish do level off.

Read Bree's article - interesting...

Actually, it wasn't me responding there, Frances.

Mind you that that article's from a rather business-oriented standpoint as a whole, not a linguistically-oriented one, and is also taking a specific stance with respect to such intonation, rather than simply describing it as a whole, and as such isn't /that/ useful for the uses of this forum. Probably a better (even though shorter) article, for our purposes, would be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

I agree with the article, particularly this:

"It has been suggested that the HRT has a facilitative function in conversation (i.e., it encourages the addressee to participate in the conversation)"

Long live HRT and valley girls!

Why don't you just watch the movie "Clueless"? All those girls seem to act like valley girls to me. Of course, I think they are fake, as I have never met a valley girl in my life, though there are tales abound... I am sure I just haven't had the pleasure yet :)

Hey, Frances -- I was the one with the response to your comment about Irish intonation.

Being interested in phonetics/phonology I often analyze my friends' speech and it's not just girls that use high-rise terminals here in so-cal. I would say the "Valley Girl" stereotype may apply to a few people but some Valley Girl characteristics are present in many Californians' speech, whether they're a girl or from "The Valley" or neither of those. However, the fact that in a typical day I'm surrounded almost exclusively by college-aged Californians (ah, state universities with their drastically lower in-state tuitions...) may give me somewhat of a skewed perspective, as something I may consider pretty normal may be interpreted as dead-giveaway of a California accent to someone from another region.

This topic is quite interesting.....Valley Girls and the HRT thing. I thought those last letters meant something else in the female world and I'd never heard of VG before until I came into this Forum.

I met several American girls at uni and one thing I really noticed in their speech was the way their sentences ended on a rising note. Apart from their tendency to swallow half their words and to talk at a frenetic speed as if the world was about to end, I found it irritating really. I guess they were all VGs then?

<<i.e., it encourages the addressee to participate in the conversation)">>

Yeah, I think that's right, on reflection....like they were ending on a note that invited an instant response...a statement was really a question.

Reese Witherspoon's accent in Legally Blonde is a typical valley girl accent.

Isn't there an early 80s movie called "Valley Girl"? Nick Cage is in it. All the girls in it are Valley girls. They hang out at malls, have crispy hair with bad highlights, and say "totally," "like," and "fer shuuuurre" a lot.

There's also Frank Zappa's song from the early '80s, "Valley Girl", featuring his daughter Moon Unit.

Song clip including some Valley Girl speech:
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/music/artist/listenwatch/0,,433556,00.html#clips

VG accent has a Cot-Caught merger, but they use both forms:
COT can be read as Midwestern(NorthernCitiesShiftless) Caught, while
CAUGHT can be read as Midwestern Cot.

So, many girls say MOM (with a Midwestern AW: MAWM), THOMAS (Midwestern: TAWM@S)...

At times, they have a British-like A: A in BAD, MANY, SAD is more open (like in Toronto English), not the BAED, MAENY, SAED...

VG accent re-introduced ''British'' forms in some words (new [nyu]).

Their U's are very fronted: cool [kewl]...

And, at times,their [ou]'s sound British, O is shwa-like at times...

I think ValleyGirl accent sounds more British than the GA...

I forgot to add, their [ei]'s become [aei] in some speakers:

baby [baeibi], that is, the first vowel in this diphthong is more open.
So British :)

Being thousands of miles away from Valleyland I'm just wondering this...is there such a thing as a Valley BOY?