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

Marking boundaries: intonation units and prosodic sentences

This paper presents a study of the prosodic correlates at the boundaries of intonation units and prosodic sentences in Jaminjung, a severely endangered language of Northern Australia, including pitch resets, final lengthening, pauses, and phonation events such as breathiness and creakiness. This analysis demonstrates that units of speech larger than IUs must be examined to account for the phenomena observed in spontaneous speech. It contributes to the ongoing debate on the nature and status of discourse units and the best methodologies for their identification (Degand and Simon 2009); it also contributes to the developing interest in examining discourse in spontaneous speech and its theoretical implications (Wichman 2006) from the perspective of an, as yet, unwritten language.

The Effects of Intonation on the Sentence-Final Particle nyei³³ in Iu-Mien

Speech Prosody, 2022

This study focuses on the interaction between tone and intonation on the prosodic realization of the sentence-final particle nyei³³ in Iu-Mien, a Hmong-Mien language spoken in parts of China and Southeast Asia. While intonation patterns of questions in colloquial Iu-Mien, in which sentence-final particle nyei³³ does not typically occur, have been described, intonation patterns with the sentence-final nyei³³ used in less colloquial settings have not been analyzed yet. Our study aims to fill this gap. Using data from five female speakers, we show that the mid-level tone 33 of nyei³³ is preserved when in the final position of statements, but surfaces as a rising or falling contour at the end of yes-no questions. In addition, we find coarticulatory effects of the preceding tone on the F0 contour of the particle.

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...