Intonational Variation in the British Isles (original) (raw)
Related papers
Modelling intonation in three Irish dialects
Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of …, 2003
This paper provides a preliminary account of features of the intonation structure of three Irish dialects, Donegal (Ulster Irish), Mayo, and Aran Islands, using the IViE system . The sentence types examined were declarative and interrogative sentences: for the latter yes/no questions and wh-questions. The picture that emerges suggests that in intonation terms we are dealing with two rather than three dialects. The first we broadly term Connaught Irish (to include Mayo and Aran Islands, which despite fairly striking segmental differences have very similar prosodic properties). These differ strikingly from the Donegal dialect in terms of the realisation of the pitch accent. For example in declarative sentences, whereas Connaught Irish is characterised by a predominantly H* pitch accent, with downstep, the Donegal pattern is predominantly L*+H. The questions arises as to whether such apparently dissimilar patterns might be regarded as similar at an underlying level, differing in terms of the time alignment of the tonal material relative to the syllabic nucleus. This potential analysis is modelled on the treatment by Bruce and Gårding [3] of word tones in Swedish dialects. The similarities of the Donegal (Ulster) patterns with those described by Grabe et al. [4] for Belfast English are also discussed, as well as the likelihood of language contact as an explanation for the latter.
Intonation Systems Across Varieties of English
2019
This chapter surveys the intonation of Northern and Southern hemisphere mainstream and non-mainstream varieties of English as well as contact varieties spoken in Hong Kong, East, West and South Africa, Singapore, India, the South Pacific islands, the Caribbean and Malta. We explore the challenges posed by their diverging prosodic structures, in terms of both prominence and edge-marking, and observe that an account of the intonation of current-day ‘Englishes’ needs to cover a broad range of typological phenomena going well beyond what is present in the extensively researched mainstream varieties. This broad range in turn provides us with a chance to observe prosodic variation within one language that is usually only available to crosslinguistic studies.
Modelling British English Intonation: An Analysis by Resynthesis of British English Intonation
1983
A great deal of research has been done, and is still being done, on intonation, and perhaps more so for English than for any other language. It is therefore necessary to explain why yet another book should be written on the subject and what new contribution to the field it will try to make. Before even this, however, the notion 'intonation' as it will be used throughout this book must be defined. In this study, the term 'intonation' is used only to refer to variations in pitch, to the exclusion of such other prosodic speech features as amplitude, duration and the like. By far the greater part of all the work done on English intonation has been inspired by educational necessity. English is widely used all over the world in such important areas as aviation, business, commerce, technology and science, and therefore a great many people whose native language is not English find they have to learn English in the performance of their jobs. Thus, a lot of work has been done on teaching English as a foreign language and on teaching English intonation as part of it. A description of intonation that is used to teach people has as an advantage that it can afford not to be completely explicit. People bring to the situation their linguistic competence: they know what a language is and how it may work. For this reason, for instance, the listen-and-repeat system can be effective. This is one of the reasons why so far not much experimental work on English intonation has been done. If an impressionistic approach, where the researcher relies mainly on his own ears to discover a system in the intonation of a language, yields good enough results for this purpose then it is perfectly legitimate. Another reason why systematic experimental work on intonation has been neglected may have to do with the practical technical problems involved. Until recently, it was hardly possible and very time-consuming even to obtain a reliable measurement of the course of the fundamental frequency of an utterance. This has changed over the past few decades and drastically so over the past few years, with computers improving and becoming more easily accessible.
Pitch accent realization in four varieties of British English
Journal of Phonetics, 2000
In intonation languages, the realization of pitch accents varies with the application of phonetic e!ects such as &&truncation'' and &&compression''. These e!ects can change the surface form of accents but do not a!ect the inventory of phonological contrasts. Cross-linguistic di!erences in the application of truncation and compression have been attested for the standard varieties of English and German, and cross-varietal di!erences have been shown to apply within Swedish and Danish. This paper provides evidence for cross-varietal di!erences in truncation and compression in four varieties of British English. We show that speakers of Cambridge English and Newcastle English compress rising and falling accents, but in Leeds English, in identical contexts, we "nd truncation. In Belfast English, we "nd rise-plateau patterns in contexts eliciting rises and falls in Cambridge English, Leeds and Newcastle, and these riseplateaux are truncated. Our data show "rstly that di!erent varieties of one language can share intonological speci"cations but di!er in the way these speci"cations are realized in F. Secondly, they show that the reverse is also possible. Di!erent varieties can share a phonetic realization e!ect, but apply this e!ect to di!erent pitch accents.
Language and Speech, 2020
This paper investigates intonation in the urban dialect of Liverpool, Scouse. Scouse is reported to be part of a group of dialects in the north of the UK where rising contours in declaratives are a traditional aspect of the dialect. This intonation is typologically unusual and has not been the subject of detailed previous research. Here, we present such an analysis in comparison with Manchester, a city less than 40 miles from Liverpool but with a noticeably different prosody. Our analysis confirms reports that rising contours are the most common realization for declaratives in Liverpool, specifically a low rise where final high pitch is not reached until the end of the phrase. Secondly, we consider the origin of declarative rises in Scouse with reference to the literature on new dialect formation. Our demographic analysis and review of previous work on relevant dialects suggests that declarative rises were not the majority variant when Scouse was formed but may have been adopted for facilitating communication in a diverse new community. We highlight this contribution of intonational data to research on phonological aspects of new dialect formation, which have largely considered segmental phonology or timing previously.
A cross-dialectal acoustic comparison of vowels in Northern and Southern British English
2014
This study compares the duration and first two formants (F1 and F2) of 11 nominal monophthongs and five nominal diphthongs in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and a Northern English dialect [Sheffield English dialect]. F1 and F2 trajectories were fitted with parametric curves using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the zeroth DCT coefficient represented formant trajectory means and the first DCT coefficient represented the magnitude and direction of formant trajectory change to characterize vowel inherent spectral change (VISC). Cross-dialectal comparisons involving these measures revealed significant differences for the phonologically back monophthongs /ɒ, ɔː, ʊ, uː/ and also /ɜː/ and the diphthongs /eɪ, əʊ, aɪ, ɔɪ/. Most cross-dialectal differences are in zeroth DCT coefficients, suggesting formant trajectory means tend to characterize such differences, while first DCT coefficient differences were more numerous for diphthongs. With respect to VISC, the most striking differences are that /uː/ is considerably more diphthongized in the Northern dialect and that the F2 trajectory of /əʊ/ proceeds in opposite directions in the two dialects. Cross-dialectal differences were found to be largely unaffected by the consonantal context in which the vowels were produced. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to VISC, consonantal context effects and speech perception.
Belfast Intonation in L2 speech
The present paper investigates the production and perception of rising intonation patterns in first language (L1) speakers of Belfast English and native German learners of English with and without previous exposure to the Belfast variety of English (BfE). Whilst there is evidence that Northern Standard German (NSG) predominantly uses falling nuclear pitch patterns in declaratives, Swiss German (SG) esp. the variety spoken in Bern [6] and BfE were previously found to produce mainly rising pitch patterns in nuclear position of declaratives. The paper investigates the question if rising pitch patterns produced by SG speakers are transferred into their L2 BfE and if so, do these cross-language similarities result in different ratings of foreign accent compared to NSG speakers. Thus two issues are addressed: (i) target association vs. target alignment and (ii) the effect of cross-varietal differences in L1 on the success of L2 acquisition.
Sorting out the phonetics and phonology of intonation: typological and acquisition data
The Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation offers several constructs for describing intonation. On the basis of data on language typology and language acquisition, this paper tries to sort out those constructs that because of their added semantic import should be characterized as phonemic, from the phonetic ones, which being language-specific as well, lead to variation without added semantic import. Phonetic constructs of intonation can be discerned when comparing languages that share similar "targets", but which show otherwise unmotivated differences. These are acquired later in L1, and tend to be persistent in L2.