The prosody of correction and contrast

In the extensive literature on the prosodic expression of Information Structure (IS) the notion of contrast is typically coarse grained and subsumed under relational dichotomies like the theme-rheme or topic-focus, or as an inherent feature of focus, evoking a set of alternatives. This paper has two goals. First, we advocate for a more nuanced conception of contrast. This distinguishes between the “alternatives” based meaning of contrast on one hand and correction on the other, which is a more discourse-oriented meaning that encodes the speaker's assumptions about the hearer's beliefs. Second, we present experimental evidence that among the pragmatic types of contrast examined, only correction receives distinct prosodic marking, which cuts across the traditional IS topic-focus division and is realized in the same way in focus and topic constituents

Southern Europe

This chapter reviews the prosodic systems and intonational phonology of a group of Southern European languages: Italian, French, Greek, and Maltese. It describes their stress, phrasing, rhythm, and intonational phonology, with particular attention to phonologically informed experimental work. In the case of Italian, given the lack of a spoken standard (which is only used by professional speakers) and the descriptions of quite a number of varieties (e.g. Bari, Florence, Naples, Palermo, Pisa, and Rome, inter alia), this review highlights common prosodic and phrasing features first, and subsequently covers any definable variety-specific intonational features. For French, the survey focuses on hexagonal French, while Athenian Greek is the representative variety for Greek, with some excursions into regional varieties. For Maltese, the chapter only focuses on its standard

The intonation and pragmatics of Greek wh-questions

We experimentally tested three hypotheses regarding the pragmatics of two tunes (one high-ending, one flat-ending) used with Greek wh-questions: (a) the high-ending tune is associated with information-seeking questions, while the flat-ending tune is also appropriate when wh-questions are not information-seeking in which case their function can instead be akin to that of a statement; (b) the high-ending tune is more polite, and (c) more appropriate for contexts leading to information-seeking questions. The wh-questions used as experimental stimuli were elicited from four speakers in contexts likely to lead to either information-seeking or non-information-seeking uses. The speakers produced distinct tunes in response to the contexts; acoustic analysis indicates these are best analysed as L*+H L-!H% (rising), and L+H* L-L% (flat). In a perception experiment where participants heard the questions out of context, they chose answers providing information significantly more frequently after high-ending than flat-ending questions, confirming hypothesis (a). In a second experiment testing hypotheses (b) and (c), participants evaluated wh-questions for appropriateness and politeness in information- and non-information-seeking contexts. High-ending questions were rated more appropriate in information-seeking contexts, and more polite independently of context relative to their flat-ending counterparts. Finally, two follow-up experiments showed that the interpretation of the two tunes was not affected by voice characteristics of individual speakers, and confirmed a participant preference for the high-ending tune. Overall, the results support our hypotheses and lead to a compositional analysis of the meaning of the two tunes, while also showing that intonational meaning is determined by both tune and pragmatic context

Rhotics.New Data and Perspectives

This book provides an insight into the patterns of variation and change of rhotics in different languages and from a variety of perspectives. It sheds light on the phonetics, the phonology, the socio-linguistics and the acquisition of /r/-sounds in languages as diverse as Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Kuikuro, Malayalam, Romanian, Slovak, Tyrolean and Washili Shingazidja thus contributing to the discussion on the unity and uniqueness of this group of sounds

Phrase-final words in Greek storytelling speech: a study on the effect of a culturally-specific prosodic feature on short-term memory

Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memoryrelated processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening, which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody. Number of syllables in target words did not reveal substantial difference in performance. The current study presents a previously undocumented culturally-specific prosodic pattern and its effect on short-term memory

Greek in Contact project

instructions_curve_fitting_process.docx Greek_in_contact_project_information.doc

Evidence for the compositionality of tunes and intonational meaning

Contains fulltext : 220391.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)05 augustus 201

Echoes of past contact: Venetian influence on Cretan Greek intonation

Prosodic aspects of cross-linguistic contact are under-researched, especially past contact that has subsequently ceased. In this paper, we investigate declarative and polar question tunes of contemporary Cretan Greek, a regional variety of Greek whose speakers were in contact with Venetian speakers during the four and half centuries of Venetian rule on the island, from 1204 to 1669. The F0 contours of the Cretan tunes and alignment of peaks and troughs of interest with the nuclear vowel are compared to the corresponding tunes in Venetian dialect and Venetian Italian and to those in Athenian (Standard) Greek, which are used as control. The data (1610 declarative utterances and 698 polar questions) were drawn from natural speech corpora based on pragmatic criteria: broad focus for declaratives, broad focus, and information-seeking interpretation for polar questions. The pitch contour shapes of the tunes are modeled using polynomial basis functions, and the F0 alignment points are determined analytically. The results show the robustness of contact effects almost three and a half centuries after regular contact ceased and indicate that the shapes of the F0 contours of Cretan and Venetian declarative and polar question tunes are similar. In addition, Cretan alignment patterns are similar to Venetian and significantly different from Athenian. Insights are gained from research into how long prosodic characteristics may persist in a recipient language—decades or even centuries after the cessation of contact

Phonological representations of consonant sequences: the case of affricates vs. ‘true’ clusters

In this paper we investigate the behavior of Greek affricates as opposed to all other Greek cluster types. The phonotactics of the language as well as the data of an off-line experimental task support a preference for the preservation of affricates over stop+/s/ over /s/+stop clusters and all other clusters. A strong tendency of the participants in the experiment was to break up clusters by inserting a vowel while they retained almost all affricates intact. This linguistic behavior is attributed, first, to the identity of place of articulation of the consonants being members of the clusters and, second, to the (degree of) satisfaction of the scale of consonantal strength. Affricates tend to exhibit a limited degree of decomposition; stop+/s/ clusters exhibit a relative degree of decomposition, /s/+stop clusters undergo and even higher degree of decomposition while other cluster types are decomposed massively. Our assumption is that different degrees of decomposition are the result of (a) different phonological representations, (b) the co-occurrence of clusters with other clusters in the word and (c) their position in the word