Intonational patterns, tonal alignment and focus in Mawng (original) (raw)

On (and off) ramps in intonational phonology: Rises, falls, and the Tonal Center of Gravity

Journal of Phonetics, 2021

Two conflicting views have been advanced of what defines 'default' high pitch accents in various West Germanic languages, including English: One equates these accents fundamentally with a rise to a high turning point, while the other focuses on the fall from it. Both views arise from the assumption within Autosegmental-Metrical theory that the phonological representations of intonational categories can be discerned more-or-less directly from the string of intentional-seeming changes of direction in the F0 curve, identified as production 'targets'. Two perceptual experiments reveal that, at least in American English, this view critically oversimplifies how pitch accents containing High tones are defined and distinguished: instead, both the shape of the rise and the shape of the fall are seen to contribute to the alignment of the overall bulk of the high region, defined by the rise-fall shape, with the segmental string, and thus to its categorization by listeners as an early, mid or late rise-fall (H + !H*, L + H*, or L* + H). These findings are consistent with the view that the Tonal Center of Gravity (TCoG) of the rise-fall shape as a whole, rather than an F0 turning point per se, is what speakers align with segmental content to distinguish different pitch accent categories. Questioning the primacy of the turning points as the phonetic targets for these pitch accents, in turn, seriously problematizes standard assumptions about the nature of phonological representations of intonation and their relation to the signal.

Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function

Frontiers in Communication

The intonational realization of utterances is generally characterized by regional as well as inter- and intra-speaker variability in f0. Category boundaries thus remain “fuzzy” and it is non-trivial how the (continuous) acoustic space maps onto (discrete) pitch accent categories. We focus on three types of rising-falling contours, which differ in the alignment of L(ow) and H(igh) tones with respect to the stressed syllable. Most of the intonational systems on German have described two rising accent categories, e.g., L+H* and L*+H in the German ToBI system. L+H* has a high-pitched stressed syllable and a low leading tone aligned in the pre-tonic syllable; L*+H a low-pitched stressed syllable and a high trailing tone in the post-tonic syllable. There are indications for the existence of a third category which lies between these two categories, with both L and H aligned within the stressed syllable, henceforth termed (LH)*. In the present paper, we empirically investigate the distincti...

Sequences of high tones across word boundaries in Tswana

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2021

The article analyses violations of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) above the word level in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language, by investigating the realization of adjacent lexical high tones across word boundaries. The results show that across word boundaries downstep (i.e. a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones) only takes place within a phonological phrase. A phonological phrase break blocks downstep, even when the necessary tonal configuration is met. A phrase-based account is adopted in order to account for the occurrence of downstep. Our study confirms a pattern previously reported for the closely related language Southern Sotho and provides controlled, empirical data from Tswana, based on read speech of twelve speakers which has been analysed auditorily by two annotators as well as acoustically.

University of New Mexico Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 1

1993

environments in which they occur, much as syntax was only studied in the rarefied environment of made-up sentences. Very little study has been devoted to the distribution of phonological elements in texts. I will argue below that the text frequency of segments affects their phonetic shape and evolution. Consider subphonemic detail and variation conditioned lexically, morphologically and socially. Generative phonology, like its predecessor, phonemic theory, chose to ignore low-level phonetic detail'. Like the detail of actual language use that has enriched functionalist syntactic theory, the study of detail in phonology will reveal important facts that bear on our understanding of how language is really processed and what structures have empirical validity. Attend to exceptions and marginal cases, for they can be valuable sources of information about the nature of processing and representation. As I will argue below, marginal 'phonemes' are particularly interesting in their consequences for phonological theory. Reconsider what Langacker 1987 calls the 'rule-list fallacy' (see also Bybee 1988). Our thinking and analyses need not be restricted to only two options-either an elements occurs in a list or it is generated by rule. I propose below that lexical elements (words or phrases) consist of actual phonetic content that is modified as these elements are used. While phonetic 'rules' may exist as articulatory patterns for the realization of words, generalizations at other levels may be better thought of as emergent generalizations over lexical representations. 5 Altaic dialects, in Eskimo-Aleut [1330iuca and Mowrey 1987b]). Or consider the changes undergone by Proto-Bantu voiceless stops (Tucker and Bryan 1957, Pagliuca and Mowrey 1987h):

Analysis of Intonation: the Case of MAE_ToBI

Laboratory Phonology, 2016

Annotation systems for intonation contours are ideally based on a well-motivated phonological analysis of the language in question, such that instances of indecision are restricted to uncertainties over what intonational structure the speaker has used, rather than over the choice of label in situations where no suitably distinctive label is available or more than one suitable label is available. This contribution inventorizes a number of cases of overanalysis and underanalysis in MAE_ToBI and argues that they are in large part due to the decision by Pierrehumbert (1980) to analyze a rising-falling accent as a rising pitch accent (L+H*) followed by a L-tone from a different source (an 'on-ramp' analysis). It is shown how the opposite choice, a falling pitch accent preceded by a L-tone from a different source (an 'off-ramp' analysis), avoids most of these problems. Results from a perception experiment testing MAE_ToBI's prediction of intonational boundaries show that steep falls do not always signal a boundary. The inclusion of a tritonal prenuclear pitch accent, which explains the absence of an intonational boundary after a steep fall followed by a gradual rise, can readily be accommodated in the 'off-ramp' analysis, but not in MAE_ToBI.

The phrase-final accent in Kammu: effects of tone, focus and engagement

Paper submitted to …, 2009

The phrase-final accent can typically contain a multitude of simultaneous prosodic signals. In this study, aimed at separating the effects of lexical tone from phrase-final intonation, phrase-final accents of two dialects of Kammu were analyzed. Kammu, a Mon-Khmer language spoken primarily in northern Laos, has dialects with lexical tones and dialects with no lexical tones. Both dialects seem to engage the phrase-final accent to simultaneously convey focus, phrase finality, utterance finality, and speaker engagement. Both dialects also show clear evidence of truncation phenomena. These results have implications for our understanding of the interaction between tone, intonation and phrase-finality.