Prosodic description: An introduction for fieldworkers

This article provides an introductory tutorial on prosodic features such as tone and accent for researchers working on little-known languages. It specifically addresses the needs of non-specialists and thus does not presuppose knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of prosodic features. Instead, it intends to introduce the uninitiated reader to a field often shied away from because of its (in part real, but in part also just imagined) complexities. It consists of a concise overview of the basic phonetic phenomena (section 2) and the major categories and problems of their functional and phonological analysis (sections 3 and 4). Section 5 gives practical advice for documenting and analyzing prosodic features in the field.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

THE EMERGENT PROSODIC SYSTEM(S) OF BILBAO-AREA STANDARD BASQUE

The aim of this study is to contribute to the larger body of research concerned with the prosodic systems of the Basque dialects currently spoken in Southern Basque country. More specifically, the author focuses on Standard Basque from the Bilbao area and its potential prosodic system(s). Standard Basque was phonologically codified by the Basque Academy, but there was no prosodic system provided by the Basque Academy. Although initial investigations have been undertaken by Hualde, more current research has shown that the standard spoken outside of the classroom is different from that which is taught (Lantto, 2019; Rodríguez-Ordóñez, 2016). Given that prosody is rarely taught within the classroom, it would not be surprising for differences to be found. The most obvious difference between Standard Basque and some of the traditional dialects is that Standard has no word-level contrastive stress; functions such as singular/plural distinctions and case are marked by postpositions. What has been determined is that the prosodic system of Standard Basque, or Batua, patterns closely to that of Gipuzkoan Basque. However, as noted by Hualde & Elordieta (2014), there is little knowledge regarding the variation of the functioning of Standard Basque’s acoustic correlates. As stated by Elordieta & Hualde (2001), it is only after a comparison of the intonational characteristics of the currently spoken dialects has been conducted that a typological categorization of Basque prosodic systems can be made. As Standard Basque was not codified with a prosodic system, it ultimately comes down to what individual speakers and speaker groups have done to account for this in their standard dialect productions. It cannot be presumed that the prosody of SB (Standard Basque) found in one region will exactly line up with prosody found in other regions; these too would need to be documented and analyzed as prosodic sub-systems. One major gap in current research is the analysis of intonation at the phrasal level; Gaminde et al. (2011) look at acoustic correlates and their respective force, but only at the word level. While Hualde looks at intonation, the study uses Gipuzkoan Basque used as a substratum, which constricts the findings to that particular dialectal region. For this reason, the dialect of Batua spoken in the Bilbao area proves to be worth investigating. The local dialect of the area was long ago lost, such that Batua could be said to be the Bilbao dialect. The revitalization movement of the 1960s brought about a significant number of new speakers, who learned the standard variety in school. To add to this, Bilbao’s presence as a major commercial hub has made it so that there is a vast number of regional vernaculars circulating throughout the area, all in contact with one another. For this study, data was taken from 6 Basque-Spanish bilinguals whose primary dialect of Basque is the standard, that participated in two experimental tasks: eliciting words in isolation in one task and eliciting neutral declaratives and yes-no questions in the other. These tasks were a means of gathering raw data on the intonation of both word and phrasal level productions. Results supports the previous findings of Gaminde et al. (2015) as well as those of Aurrekoetxea et al. (2015), in terms of how stress is realized in Standard Basque when taking into account factors such as syllable weight and syllable count. What’s more, findings also support the proposition of Hualde & Beristain (to appear) that inter-speaker variation will be heavily affected by the contact speakers have with other dialects of Basque

Prosodic Focus Within and Across Languages

The fact that purely prosodic marking of focus may be weaker in some languages than in others, and that it varies in certain circumstances even within a single language, has not been commonly recognized. Therefore, this dissertation investigated whether and how purely prosodic marking of focus varies within and across languages. We conducted production and perception experiments using a paradigm of 10-digit phone-number strings in which the same material and discourse contexts were used in different languages. The results demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus varied across languages. Speakers of American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Standard French clearly modulated duration, pitch, and intensity to indicate the position of corrective focus. Listeners of these languages recognized the focus position with high accuracy. Conversely, speakers of Seoul Korean, South Kyungsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese, and Suzhou Wu produced a weak and ambiguous modulation by focus, resulting in a poor identification performance. This dissertation also revealed that prosodic marking of focus varied even within a single language. In Mandarin Chinese, a focused low/dipping tone (tone 3) received a relatively poor identification rate compared to other focused tones (about 77% vs. 91%). This lower identification performance was due to the smaller capacity of tone 3 for pitch range expansion and local dissimilatory effects around tone 3 focus. In Seoul Korean, prosodic marking of focus differed based on the tonal contrast (post-lexical low vs. high tones). The identification rate of high tones was twice as high than that of low tones (about 24% vs. 51%), the reason being that low tones had a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion than high tones. All things considered, this dissertation demonstrates that prosodic focus is not always expressed by concomitant increased duration, pitch, and intensity. Accordingly, purely prosodic marking of focus is neither completely universal nor automatic, but rather is expressed through the prosodic structure of each language. Since the striking difference in focus-marking success does not seem to be determined by any previously-described typological feature, this must be regarded as an indicator of a new typological dimension, or as a function of a new typological space

New Approach to Teaching Japanese Pronunciation in the Digital Era - Challenges and Practices

Pronunciation has been a black hole in the L2 Japanese classroom on account of a lack of class time, teacher\u2019s confidence, and consciousness of the need to teach pronunciation, among other reasons. The absence of pronunciation instruction is reported to result in fossilized pronunciation errors, communication problems, and learner frustration. With an intention of making a contribution to improve such circumstances, this paper aims at three goals. First, it discusses the importance, necessity, and e ectiveness of teaching prosodic aspects of Japanese pronunciation from an early stage in acquisition. Second, it shows that Japanese prosody is challenging because of its typological rareness, regardless of the L1 backgrounds of learners. Third and finally, it introduces a new approach to teaching L2 pronunciation with the goal of developing L2 comprehensibility by focusing on essential prosodic features, which is followed by discussions on key issues concerning how to implement the new approach both inside and outside the classroom in the digital era

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

Prosodic strengthening on the /s/-stop cluster and the phonetic implementation of an allophonic rule in English

AbstractThis acoustic study investigates effects of boundary and prominence on the temporal structure of s#CV and #sCV in English, and on the phonetic implementation of the allophonic rule whereby a voiceless stop after /s/ becomes unaspirated. Results obtained with acoustic temporal measures for /sCV/ sequences showed that the segments at the source of prosodic strengthening (i.e., /s/ in #sCV for boundary marking and the nucleus vowel for prominence marking) were expanded in both absolute and relational terms, whereas other durational components distant from the source (e.g., stop closure duration in #sCV) showed temporal expansion only in the absolute measure. This suggests that speakers make an extra effort to expand the very first segment and the nucleus vowel more than the rest of the sequence in order to signal the pivotal loci of the boundary vs. the prominence information. The potentially ambiguous s#CV and #sCV sequences (e.g., ice#can vs. eye#scan) were never found to be neutralized even in the phrase-internal condition, cuing the underlying syllable structures with fine phonetic detail. Most crucially, an already short lag VOT in #sCV (due to the allophonic rule) was shortened further under prosodic strengthening, which was interpreted as enhancement of the phonetic feature {voiceless unaspirated}. It was proposed that prosodic strengthening makes crucial reference to the phonetic feature system of the language and operates on a phonetic feature, including the one derived by a language-specific allophonic rule. An alternative account was also discussed in gestural terms in the framework of Articulatory Phonology

Intonation in European and Brazilian Portuguese

This chapter describes the intonation system of Portuguese, concentrating on the analysis of the three main functions of intonation: demarcation, highlighting, and distinction of utterance types. It is based on the description of a single variety: the Lisbon variety for European Portuguese (EP), and the Rio de Janeiro variety for Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The chapter describes the language-particular preferences in intonational grouping that characterize European and Brazilian Portuguese, the size of intonational phrases, the distribution of tonal events within the intonational phrase and the ways in which intonational boundaries are realized. The chapter describes the intonation of two major types of questions: wh-questions and yes-no questions, as types of pragmatically neutral information-seeking questions. It is concerned with the intonation of wh-questions with the question word in sentence initial position. Finally, the chapter presents a typological look at the intonation of Portuguese within the Romance space.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A case for a unified analysis of question constructions in English, Sinhala and Tamil

Questions, that play a vital role in communication, are classified in every language, as content questions (Wh-questions) and polar questions (Yes/No questions), depending on the nature of the information they elicit. The common and deviant phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties used in the construction of these two question types in the three languages used in Sri Lanka - English, Sinhala and Tamil – provide a fascinating topic for an investigation. While all three languages are equally represented in the present investigation, the morphological and syntactic properties used in the construction of questions in all three languages are studied with reference to written data gathered from writings and, in addition, the phonological properties, with reference to vocal recordings. Further, both written and spoken data are analysed to identify the identical and non-identical elements in the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties, that are peculiar to the languages concerned. With respect to morpho-syntactic characteristics, the Wh-words in content questions in both Sinhala and Tamil remain in-situ as opposed to those in English that undergo movement. Regarding Yes/No questions, Sinhala employs the particle –da, while English employs the strategy of –do- insertion or auxiliary movement, but Tamil realizes a Yes/No question with phonological prominence in the clause final position. It was found that there are very significant prosodic properties common in the three languages despite their surface morpho-syntactic differences. With respect to phonological characteristics in all three languages: the Wh-words in content questions receive phonological stress; the clause final position in Yes/No questions receives prominence; and the clause final word receives prominence in echo-questions. KEYWORDS: questions, phonology, morphology, synta