In phonetics, upstep is a phonemic or phonetic upward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. Upstep is much rarer as a phoneme than its opposite, downstep. The symbol for upstep in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript up arrow, ꜛ (↑). It`s not uncommon to see a superscript inverted exclamation mark, ....