scholarly journals An intonational grammar for Icelandic

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Dehé
Keyword(s):  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the tonal grammar of Icelandic and to complement the tone inventory as previously described in the literature (Árnason 1998). Specifically, types of pitch accents and edge tones and their combinations in neutral declaratives and questions, and in utterances containing narrow focus are addressed. Two pitch accent types (H* and L*) and two edge tones (H- and L-) are identified, for which evidence has not been found in previous research. Moreover, the paper shows for declaratives, that along with downstep, Icelandic has upstep across Intonational Phrases. Upstep applies to a series of pitch peaks. It may occur in neutral declaratives and in utterances with final narrow focus. Overall, the results of this study provide a substantial addition to our knowledge of Icelandic intonational phonology.

scholarly journals The Role of Prosodic Breaks and Pitch Accents in Grouping Words during On-line Sentence Processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 2447-2467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Bögels ◽  
Herbert Schriefers ◽  
Wietske Vonk ◽  
Dorothee J. Chwilla
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
On Line ◽  
Group Words ◽  
Pitch Accents

The present study addresses the question whether accentuation and prosodic phrasing can have a similar function, namely, to group words in a sentence together. Participants listened to locally ambiguous sentences containing object- and subject-control verbs while ERPs were measured. In Experiment 1, these sentences contained a prosodic break, which can create a certain syntactic grouping of words, or no prosodic break. At the disambiguation, an N400 effect occurred when the disambiguation was in conflict with the syntactic grouping created by the break. We found a similar N400 effect without the break, indicating that the break did not strengthen an already existing preference. This pattern held for both object- and subject-control items. In Experiment 2, the same sentences contained a break and a pitch accent on the noun following the break. We argue that the pitch accent indicates a broad focus covering two words [see Gussenhoven, C. On the limits of focus projection in English. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: University Press, 1999], thus grouping these words together. For object-control items, this was semantically possible, which led to a “good-enough” interpretation of the sentence. Therefore, both sentences were interpreted equally well and the N400 effect found in Experiment 1 was absent. In contrast, for subject-control items, a corresponding grouping of the words was impossible, both semantically and syntactically, leading to processing difficulty in the form of an N400 effect and a late positivity. In conclusion, accentuation can group words together on the level of information structure, leading to either a semantically “good-enough” interpretation or a processing problem when such a semantic interpretation is not possible.

scholarly journals The intonation of the Q-marking construction: A comparison of Hungarian and Slovenian

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-397
Author(s):  
LOUISE MYCOCK
Keyword(s):  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Pitch Accents

This paper examines the Q-marking construction: an interrogative construction in which a question phrase takes scope over a higher clause even though it appears in a lower clause. In this construction, the scope of a question phrase is extended by the presence of another word, the Q-marker, in a higher clause. While the syntax of this construction has been described and analysed in a number of works, its intonation is yet to receive commensurate attention. This paper presents data from two unrelated languages in which the Q-marking construction can be used to form questions: Hungarian and Slovenian. Data show that while the Q-marker shares properties with question words in Hungarian (they bear the same pitch accent), in Slovenian the Q-marker and question words bear distinct pitch accents. Furthermore, in Hungarian a direct intonational link exists between the Q-marker and a question phrase whose scope is extended, rather than an indirect one between the Q-marker and the entire lower clause in which the question phrase appears. The Slovenian data are compatible with the existence of either an indirect or a direct intonational link. These findings reveal hitherto unidentified dimensions of cross-linguistic variation, for which any analysis of the Q-marking construction must account.

Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA COLANTONI ◽  
JORGE GURLEKIAN
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Early Peak ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

scholarly journals Entonación de los enunciados aseverativos en el español de la Ciudad de México entre los años 1960 y 1970

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-41
Author(s):  
Érika Mendoza Vázquez ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Prosodic Features ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Level Of Education ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Significant Factors

This paper describes the prosodic features —with emphasis on the nuclear pitch accent— of the statements documented in the corpus “Norma lingüística culta” and “Habla popular de la Ciudad de México” (Lope Blanch, 1971, 1976). The prosodic description is carried out with the Autosegmental Metrical model and the analysis of sociolinguistic factors. Regarding the nuclear pitch accent L+H *, the statistical analysis showed two significant factors: narrow focus statements and the low level of education. The nuclear accent H * is more prevalent in men and the low level of education. By contrast we observed that the group of adults, the higher education and the broad focus statements favor the descending contour, which has lesser relation with vernacular patterns in Central Mexican Spanish.

scholarly journals Gesture, Prosody and Information Structure Synchronisation in Turkish

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Olcay Turk
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Gesture Production

<p>This thesis investigates the synchronisation of gesture with prosody and information structure in Turkish. Speech and gesture have a close relationship in human communication, and they are tightly coordinated in production. Research has shown that gestural units are synchronised with prosodic units on a prominence-related micro level (i.e., pitch accents and gesture apexes), however these studies have largely been on a small number of languages of a similar prosodic type, not including Turkish, which has prominence-less prosodic words. It is known that both gesture and speech, through prosody, are hierarchically structured with nested phrasal constituents, but little is known about gesture-prosody synchronisation at this macro level. Even less is known about the timing relationships of gesture with information structure, which is also closely related to prosody. This thesis links gesture to information structure as a part of a three-way synchronisation relationship of gesture, prosody, and information structure.  Four participants were filmed in a narrative task, resulting in three hours of Turkish natural speech and gesture data. Selected sections were annotated for prosody using an adapted scheme for Turkish in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework, for information structure and for gesture. In total, there were over 20,000 annotations.  The synchronisation of gesture and speech units was systematically investigated at (1) the micro level, and (2) the macro level. At the micro level, this thesis asked which tones apexes are synchronised with, and whether this synchronisation depends on other prosodic and gestural features. It was found that gesture apexes were synchronised with pitch accents if there were pitch accents in the relevant prosodic phrases; if not, they were synchronised with low tones that marked the onsets of prosodic words. This synchronisation pattern was largely consistent across different prosodic and gestural contexts, although it was tighter in the nuclear area. These findings confirm prominence as a constraint on synchronisation with evidence of pitch accent-apex synchronisation. The findings also extend our knowledge of the typology of micro-level synchronisation to cases where prominence is locally absent showing that micro-level synchronisation also obeys the prosodic hierarchy.  At the macro level, the aim was to find the prosodic anchor for single gesture phrases while testing for the possible effects of prosodic, gestural and information structural contexts. The findings showed that there was no one-to-one synchronisation of single gesture phrases with single intermediate or intonational phrases. However, it was found that gesture phrases often spanned over multiple consecutive intermediate phrases, and the synchronisation of gesture phrase boundaries was with the boundaries of these intermediate phrase groupings. In addition, these groupings tended to be combinations of pre-nuclear and nuclear intermediate phrases constituting the default focus position in Turkish. This synchronisation behaviour over the focal domain implied that there might be another speech element governing the speech-gesture synchronisation which also informs prosody, i.e. information structure.  Based on this finding and a few other associations in the earlier studies, it was hypothesised that gesture is also informed by and synchronised with information structure. In order to test this hypothesis, it was investigated whether gesture phrases were synchronised with information structural units, i.e., topics, foci and background. The findings showed that gesture phrases tended to accompany discursively prominent foci over topics and background. However, gesture phrases did not show perfect synchronisation with any of these information structure units, although there was a systematic overlap in which foci and topics were contained within the duration of complete gesture phrases. Further investigations revealed that gesture phrase parts that bear apex related meaning provided a much better anchor for the synchronisation of information structure units. The preference for accompanying and synchronisation with the parts of gesture bearing gesturally prominent apical meaning also highlighted that prominence is a driving factor of synchronisation at the macro level as well as at the micro level.  This thesis has revealed pivotal links between gesture, prosody and information structure through a systematic investigation of synchronisation of these structures. The implications of these links have also been discussed within the thesis, and a model of speech and gesture production integrating synchronisation has been proposed. Overall, the thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of speech and gesture production, explaining how these interact during natural speech.</p>

Prosodic Characteristics of Sentences with Communicatively Marked and Communicatively Unmarked Alignment

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (6) ◽  
pp. 595-608
Author(s):  
Bistra Dimitrova ◽  
◽  
Snezhina Dimitrova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Prosodic Features ◽  
Pitch Range ◽  
Pitch Accents

The paper presents the results from a study of the interaction between intonation and information structure in SVO and OVS sentences with communicatively (un)marked alignment of information structure elements. We analyzed the prosodic features of pre-nuclear and nuclear pitch accents. The information structure elements were characterized using Steedman’s (2000) model which classifies sentence constituents as belonging to one of the following categories: theme-background, theme-focus, rheme-background and rheme-focus. Our study found that unmarked and marked alignment has no effect on the pitch range of the rheme-focus. In cases of communicatively unmarked alignment, the pitch range of the theme-background (and rheme-background) group in OVS sentences is wider than in SVO sentences. Word order has no effect on the duration of the accented syllable. Topicalized constituents belonging to the theme-background in OVS sentences with unmarked alignment form separate intermediate phrases. In cases of marked alignment, the rheme-focus ends with a phrase accent and sometimes a pause. The rheme-background and rheme-focus always take a pitch accent, whereas the theme-background is marked by a pitch accent only in cases of communicatively unmarked alignment. The theme-background is deaccented when the sentence is communicatively marked.

scholarly journals The prosody of rhetorical questions in English

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE DEHÉ ◽  
BETTINA BRAUN
Keyword(s):  
Information Seeking ◽  
Voice Quality ◽  
Previous Literature ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Semantic Difference ◽  
Production Experiment ◽  
Rhetorical Questions ◽  
Pitch Accents

This article contributes to our knowledge about the prosodic realisation of rhetorical questions (RQs) as compared to information-seeking questions (ISQs). It reports on a production experiment testing the prosody of English wh- and polar RQs and ISQs in a Canadian variety. In previous literature, the contribution of prosody to the distinction between the two illocution types has often been limited to the intonational realisation of the terminus of the utterance, i.e. whether it ends in a rise or a fall. Along with edge tones, we tested other phonological and phonetic parameters. Our results are as follows: (i) The intonational terminus was distinctive only for polar questions (rise vs plateau), not for wh-questions (low throughout). (ii) Moreover, the semantic difference between RQs and ISQs is signalled by pitch accents. It is reflected in nuclear pitch accent type for wh-questions, and accent type and position for polar questions. (iii) Phonetically, RQs are produced with longer constituent durations and – for wh-questions – a softer voice quality in the wh-word. Taken together, several intonational categories and phonetic parameters contribute to the distinction between RQs and ISQs. A simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is in any case insufficient.

scholarly journals Non-Final Focus Accents in The Speech of Advanced Italian Learners of German

2015 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Paschke ◽  
Barbara Vogt
Keyword(s):  
Success Rate ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
Correct Placement ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Focus Condition ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Pitch Accents

This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in non-native German. Ten proficient learners of German with Italian L1 were recorded reading aloud 40 sentences containing mostly non-final focused constituents embedded in an adequate question context. Non-final focus accents in L2 German are difficult for Italian learners to produce, especially in broad focus contexts with de-accentuation of final verb forms (cf. Paschke/Vogt, in press), because their native language has a strong positional requirement of rightmostness. Given that both German and Italian use pitch accents for information structuring, i. e. to highlight important information, a correct placement of focus accents might, however, be favoured by narrow focus contexts in which prosodic prominence has to be assigned to one specific constituent. In addition to this main hypothesis, the study investigated whether additional clues (such as prosodic highlighting of the relevant constituent in the L2 question, a corresponding syntactic and prosodic structure between L1 and L2) might increase the success rate. The data shows that advanced Italian speakers of German L2 correctly realize non-final focus accents in more than half of the narrow focus contexts, but that their success rate is not significantly higher than in the broad focus condition and is not affected by the additional clues provided.

scholarly journals Perception in Black and White: Effects of Intonational Variables and Filtering Conditions on Sociolinguistic Judgments With Implications for ASR

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole R. Holliday
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Black And White ◽  
African American Language ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Computational Systems ◽  
Pitch Accents

This study tests the effects of intonational contours and filtering conditions on listener judgments of ethnicity to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding on how prosody influences these judgments, with implications for austomatic speech recognition systems as well as speech synthesis. In a perceptual experiment, 40 American English listeners heard phrase-long clips which were controlled for pitch accent type and focus marking. Each clip contained either two H* (high) or two L+H* (low high) pitch accents and a L-L% (falling) boundary tone, and had also previously been labelled for broad or narrow focus. Listeners rated clips in two tasks, one with unmodified stimuli and one with stimuli lowpass filtered at 400 Hz, and were asked to judge whether the speaker was “Black” or “White”. In the filtered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were more likely to be rated as “Black”, with an interaction such that broad focus enhanced this pattern, supporting earlier findings that listeners may perceive African American Language as having more variation in possible pitch accent meanings. In the unfiltered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were less likely to be rated as Black, with no effect of focus, likely due to the fact that listeners relied more heavily on available segmental information in this condition. These results enhance our understanding of cues listeners rely on in making social judgments about speakers, especially in ethnic identification and linguistic profiling, by highlighting perceptual differences due to listening environment as well as predicted meaning of specific intonational contours. They also contribute to our understanding of the role of how human listeners interpret meaning within a holistic context, which has implications for the construction of computational systems designed to replicate the properties of natural language. In particular, they have important applicability to speech synthesis and speech recognition programs, which are often limited in their capacities due to the fact that they do not make such holistic sociolinguistic considerations of the meanings of input or output speech.

scholarly journals The prosodic properties of narrow information focus in Central Mexican Spanish: Pitch accents, de-emphasis and phrasing

Loquens ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. e069
Author(s):  
Érika Mendoza Vázquez ◽  
Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo ◽  
Pedro Martín Butragueño
Keyword(s):  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Primary Factor ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Properties Of Information ◽  
Information Focus ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Flat Pattern

This paper investigates the different prosodic strategies used for the marking of information focus in Central Mexican Spanish. For this purpose, we carried out a study of the prosodic properties of information focus both in clause final position and in situ. Our results show important differences when compared to other varieties of Spanish. Specifically, we observe that the most frequent accent signaling information focus is a monotonal pitch accent (L* or !H*) and not L+H*. Furthermore, in many cases we observe that the pitch accent is not the only mechanism used to signal the focus: this is because we observe the presence of prosodic edges to the left of the focus, presumably functioning as an additional prosodic cue to identify it. Additionally, while we do not observe deaccenting of post-focal material, we do observe a sequence of non-rising forms (a flat pattern or “de-emphasis”) following the pitch accent that signals an in situ information focus forced by the test. With respect to phonological phrasing, our results confirm the analysis in Prieto (2006), where it is proposed that syntactic constituency is not the primary factor that regulates phrasing in Spanish.

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