Tone and intonation: introductory notes and practical recommendations

International audienceThe present article aims to propose a simple introduction to the topics of (i) lexical tone, (ii) intonation, and (iii) tone-intonation interactions, with practical recommendations for students. It builds on the authors' observations on various languages, tonal and non-tonal; much of the evidence reviewed concerns tonal languages of Asia. With a view to providing beginners with an adequate methodological apparatus for studying tone and intonation, the present notes emphasize two salient dimensions of linguistic diversity. The first is the nature of the lexical tones: we review the classical distinction between (i) contour tones that can be analyzed into sequences of level tones, and (ii) contour tones that are non-decomposable (phonetically complex). A second dimension of diversity is the presence or absence of intonational tones: tones of intonational origin that are formally identical with lexical (and morphological) tones

‘Pitch accent’ and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic: Reassessing the role of contact

This paper considers the origin of ‘pitch accents’ in Scottish Gaelic with a view to evaluating the hypothesis that this feature was borrowed from North Germanic varieties spoken by Norse settlers in medieval Scotland. It is shown that the ‘pitch accent’ system in Gaelic is tightly bound with metrical structure (more precisely syllable count), certainly diachronically, and probably (at least in some varieties) synchronically. Gaelic ‘pitch accent’ is argued to be a plausible internal development, parallel to similar phenomena in other branches of Celtic (specifically in Breton), as well as in Germanic. This conclusion may appear to undermine the contact hypothesis, especially in the absence of reliable written sources; nevertheless, a certain role for Norse-Gaelic contact in the appearance of the pitch accent system cannot be completely exclude

On the development of a new standard norm in Italian

This chapter provides an overview of the main topics concerning the restandardization process of Italian. We will first discuss some general issues related to the Italian sociolinguistic situation, paying special attention to the status of Italo-Romance dialects and their relationship with Italian, the demotization process entailed by the twentieth century massive spread of the standard language, and the connection between neo-standard Italian and regional standards. The focus will then turn to neo-standard Italian: in particular, we will deal with some morphosyntactic features which were excluded from the standard literary norm (codified and established in the sixteenth century) but have survived over time in non-standard varieties. These features finally penetrated the standard usage, progressively giving rise to what is called neo-standard Italian. After a concise review of previous studies on neo-standard Italian, we will situate this variety within the current debate on the development of “new standards” in various European languages. In this respect, special consideration will be given to the notions of “destandardization”, “informalization” and “dehomogenization”. We conclude by presenting a brief outline of the chapters in this volume

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community

Information Structure in Asia: Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic)

International audienceLanguages of Asia are highly diverse. Rather than attempting a review of the literature about information structure in this huge linguistic area, this chapter provides observations about two languages that differ sharply in terms of how they convey information structure. Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan) is an example of a language with abundant morphemes expressing information structure, whereas Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) makes little use of such morphemes. Along with key morphosyntactic facts, this chapter presents the role played by intonation in conveying information structure in these two tonal languages

A typology of stranded phonologically weak elements

Artykuł przedstawia syntetyczne ujęcie kilku pozornie różnych zjawisk z języków japońskiego, serbsko-chorwackiego, niemieckiego i holenderskiego. W ich wyniku składnik atoniczny zostaje uniezależniony od składnika ortotonicznego, z którym w innych warunkach tworzy zestrój akcentowy. Autor proponuje nową typologię języków, w których możliwość takiej separacji składnika atonicznego warunkuje jego sąsiedztwo z granicą prozodyczną. Podstawą klasyfikacji jest siła granicy prozodycznej umożliwiającej separację, a języki dzielą się na te, w których jest ona możliwa w sąsiedztwie granicy frazy wypowiedzenia (║), te, w których jej warunkiem jest sąsiedztwo z granicą frazy intonacyjnej (#) oraz te, które dopuszczają separację w sąsiedztwie dowolnej z tych dwóch granic. Ponadto pozycja odseparowanego składnika atonicznego względem granicy prozodycznej odzwierciedla jego zwyczajową pozycję względem składnika ortotonicznego. Przedrostki i proklityki tworzą zestrój akcentowy z następującym po nich składnikiem, a ich uniezależnienie jest możliwe tylko przed granicą prozodyczną. Z kolei w przypadku enklityk i przyrostków, które tworzą zestrój akcentowy z występującym przed nim składnikiem ortotonicznym, separacja jest możliwa wtedy, gdy granica prozodyczna je poprzedza.The paper presents a unified account of a number of superficially very different cases from Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, German, and Dutch where a phonologically weak element is stranded without a host. It proposes a new typology regarding when a phonologically weak element can be stranded where adjacency to a prosodic boundary is necessary for such stranding, with parametrization regarding the strength of the prosodic boundary: it can be an utterance boundary (║) or an intonational-phrase boundary (#), or either║or # (in the last case, both boundaries can license the stranding). Furthermore, the difference in the direction of adjacency to the prosodic boundary mirrors the difference in the adjacency to the host: if the relevant element is a prefix/proclitic, both the host and the prosodic boundary follow it, if it is an enclitic/suffix, they both precede it

Musical Evidence for Low Boundary Tones in Ancient Greek

Several scholars have suggested that in ancient Greek there was a low boundary tone at the end of a relatively small prosodic constituent such as a clitic group or maximal prosodic word. The boundary tone may phonologically motivate some puzzling pitch-accentual phenomena in the language. One is the diachronic pitch-peak retraction that led to the circumflex pitch accent (HL) on penultimate syllables (the “sōtêra rule”). Another is the intonational phrase-internal downstepping or deletion of a word-final acute accent (H); that conversion of an acute to a grave accent is known as “lulling” or “koímēsis”. If such a low boundary tone existed, its effects should still be audible in ancient Greek non-strophic vocal music, where there is a significant correlation between the pitch movement of the text and the movement of the melody to which it is set, i.e. between tone and tune. Specifically, proponents of such a low boundary tone would predict that the turning point between falling and rising melody, the “musical trough”, should center around the word-final mora or syllable. The present study provides the first full description of troughs in the Delphic Hymns and finds that they are indeed closely aligned with word-end. Furthermore, once other factors that could lead to word-final troughs are set aside, i.e. once potential confounds are controlled for, the association of the trough with word-end remains strong, suggesting that we should in fact reconstruct the low boundary tone

Intonation & Prosodic Structure in Beaver (Athabaskan) - Explorations on the language of the Danezaa

This dissertation reports on qualitative and quantitative investigations on the intonation and the prosodic structure of Beaver, an endangered Athabaskan language of Northwest Canada. The focus of the study is on the Northern Alberta dialect of Beaver, which has lexical tone and is a high marking Athabaskan language. The theoretical framework of the analysis is the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) theory. Following some background on intonation and prosody as well as the theoretical modelling, we summarize contributions dealing with intonation in languages that share certain features with Beaver, i.e. tone languages, polysynthetic languages and finally the related Athabaskan languages. After a brief introduction to the grammatical structure and the sociolinguistic situation of Northern Alberta Beaver, the database of the present study is introduced. It consists of narratives and task oriented dialogues as well as recordings elicited with stimuli sets. In the domain of intonation and prosody, three topics are investigated in detail. First, domain initial prosodic strengthening is analyzed. We show that a boundary initial position at higher constituents of the prosodic hierarchy has a lengthening effect on VOT of both aspirated and unaspirated plosives, while nasals are shortened in this context. Additionally, effects of morphological category (stem vs. prefix) and intervocalic position � two mechanisms that have been described for other Athabaskan languages � are also attested for Beaver to some degree. Second, the intonational tones that have been found in the corpus are analyzed within the AM theory. In Northern Alberta Beaver, boundary tones and phrase accents make up the intonational inventory. Most notably, an initial phrase accent is used to mark contrast, which is a device that has not been reported for the marking of information structure in other languages. Lastly, the interaction of information structure with pitch range in complex noun phrases is tested in a controlled experiment. Here, we find that pitch range is significantly wider for new information than for given, which is due to a raising of the top line, while the baseline is not affected to the same extend

Pitch accent alignment in Romance: primary and secondary associations with metrical structure

International audienceThe article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for such facts within the AM model, the article develops the notion of 'phonological anchoring' as an extension of the concept of secondary association originally proposed by Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988), and later adopted by Grice (1995), Grice, Ladd & Arvaniti (2000) and others to explain the behavior of edge tones. The Romance data represent evidence that not only peripheral edge tones seek secondary associations. We claim that the phonological representation of pitch accents should include two independent mechanisms to encode alignment properties with metrical structure: (1) encoding of the primary phonological association (or affiliation) between the tone and its tone-bearing unit; and (2), for some specific cases, encoding of the secondary phonological anchoring of tones to prosodic edges (moras, syllables and prosodic words). The Romance data described in the article provide crucial evidence of mora-edge, syllable-edge, and word-edge H tonal associations