Shiwilu (Jebero)

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W. The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor- Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged version of the thesis, which includes an outline of the phonology, was published as Bendor-Samuel (1961). Whereas recent publications have focused on the social position of the Shiwilu language (Valenzuela 2010), morpho-syntactic aspects (Valenzuela 2011), and a formal demonstration of its family affiliation with the Shawi language (a.k.a. Chayahuita) (Valenzuela Bismarck 2011), the present article is the first account of its sound system since the work by Bendor-Samuel

Fine phonetic detail and intonational meaning

International audienceThe development of theories about form-function relations in intonation should be informed by a better understanding of the dependencies that hold among different phonetic parameters. Fine phonetic detail encodes both linguistically structured meaning and paralinguistic meaning. <BR /

Notions and subnotions in information structure

Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings

Measuring phonetic salience and perceptual distinctiveness: the lexical tone contrast of Venlo Dutch

O artigo mostra que as diferenças fonéticas entre os dois tons do dialeto Limburguês falado em Venlo, Holanda, percebidas por falantes nativos e por falantes do holandês padrão se correlacionam discretamente com o grau de identificação dos tons pelos falantes nativos, numa grande variedade de contextos entonacionais. Entre as medidas acústicas feitas, apenas a F0 explica o êxito na identificação dos tons pelos falantes nativos. Ainda que diferenças de duração fossem significativas, elas não contribuíram para os índices de identificação. Revelou-se difícil explicar julgamentos sobre diferenças fonéticas com base em medidas acústicas. A investigação fornece argumento para a tese de que a saliência fonética determina o grau em que os contrastes fonológicos são percebidos pelos falantes nativos. Mostra, ainda, que as diferenças fonéticas percebidas são consistentes entre os diferentes grupos de ouvintes, mas que suas bases acústicas podem ser difíceis de determinar

Perceived vowel duration

"Two subjects that lie close to Sieb Nooteboom’s professional heart are speech perception and vowel duration, and I am therefore pleased that I can combine these two interests in my contribution to this volume. I am concerned with the difference between acoustic duration and perceived duration, which concepts differ in a similar way to fundamental frequency and pitch. I will claim that vowel height affects perceived duration, in the sense that higher vowels sound longer than lower vowels when acoustic durations are equal. That is, vowel height and perceived duration are positively correlated. In section 2, I present the results of a perception experiment with Dutch listeners which shows this correlation. In sections 3 and 4 I deal with the two main questions that this finding raises. The first concerns the reason for this correlation. I will argue that it is to be sought in a mechanism of compensatory listening, and will cite other cases in the literature that have been given parallel explanations. The second question is whether the correlation is of any significance for the phonetics or phonology of languages. Here, I will argue that it solves a two cases of vowel raising, one phonetic and one phonological, in English and Limburgian Dutch, respectively

Testing the Reality of Focus Domains

An experiment was carried out which was aimed at testing the hypothesis that, in English, prominence on a predicate contains no information about the &quot;given-new&quot; status of that predicate if it is followed by a (lexical) object that carries a sentence accent. The results are taken to lend support to a view of English prosody whereby (a) prosodic structure is not (fully) predictable from syntactic structure, and (b) the relation between &quot;new&quot;-ness and a sentence accent is indirect

Analysis of Intonation: the Case of MAE_ToBI

Annotation systems for intonation contours are ideally based on a well-motivated phonological analysis of the language in question, such that instances of indecision are restricted to uncertainties over what intonational structure the speaker has used, rather than over the choice of label in situations where no suitably distinctive label is available or more than one suitable label is available. This contribution inventorizes a number of cases of overanalysis and underanalysis in MAE_ToBI and argues that they are in large part due to the decision by Pierrehumbert (1980) to analyze a rising-falling accent as a rising pitch accent (L+H*) followed by a L-tone from a different source (an ‘on-ramp’ analysis). It is shown how the opposite choice, a falling pitch accent preceded by a L-tone from a different source (an ‘off-ramp’ analysis), avoids most of these problems. Results from a perception experiment testing MAE_ToBI’s prediction of intonational boundaries show that steep falls do not always signal a boundary. The inclusion of a tritonal prenuclear pitch accent, which explains the absence of an intonational boundary after a steep fall followed by a gradual rise, can readily be accommodated in the ‘off-ramp’ analysis, but not in MAE_ToBI