Suprasegmental transcription

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Intonation on Bornholm - between Danish and Swedish

Acoustic investigations of seven speakers on the island of Bornholm and two speakers from Copenhagen, Malmö and Stockholm, respectively, have proved Bornholm to be an interesting compound, prosodically, between Standard Danish and Swedish. A prosodic continuum can be established from Standard Danish, via Skania, over Bornholm, to Standard Swedish. The parameters investigated are (1) manifestation of sentence accent, (2) manifestation of sentence intonation, (3) alignment of fundamental frequency with syllables and segments at the level of the prosodic stress group, and (4) final lengthening. One particularly interesting implication of the results is the division, both according to their function and their form, of sentence accents into (1) prosodically or syntactically determined final default accents and (2) contextually or pragmatically determined focal accents. Default accents are nonexistent in Standard Danish and Skanian, optional in Bornholm and obligatory in Stockholm. Focal accents are non-existent in Standard Danish, optional - but rather rare - in Skanian, optional - but rather frequent - in Bornholm and obligatory in Stockholm

Variability and invariance in Danish stress group patterns

Three aspects of the fundamental frequency (Fø) pattern associated with the prosodic stress group in Standard Danish are examined in acoustic analyses of recordings by four speakers. (1) Evidence is presented in favour of previous statements to the effect that short stress groups will have Fø patterns which are truncated rather than compressed editions of those found with longer stress groups. (2) The shape of the Fø pattern can be considered basically invariant (for a given speaker) and independent of the segmental structure of the stress group, but its surface manifestation is modified by intrinsic Fø level differences between vowels of different tongue height, and by the intonational context. (3) Fø patterns in extremely long prosodic stress groups are investigated: With one speaker the falling slope is decomposed into a succession of two shorter ones, with a distinct partial resetting between them, which together describe an overall declination, much reminiscent of the way long sentence intonation contours behave. With three speakers the Fø course through the unstressed syllables is more akin to a mildly undulating wave. The initial fall levels out and falls again, or performs a slow fall-rise-fall

Text and intonation - a case study

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Standard Danish intonation

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Stress group patterns, focus signalling and sentence intonation in two regional Danish standard languages: Aalborg and Næstved

This paper investigates stress group patterns, prosodic focus signalling and sentence intonation contours in Standard Danish as spoken on a substratum of Northern Jutland (Aalborg) and South Zealand (Næstved) dialect. The major difference between these two regions (and the difference to Standard Copenhagen Danish) is to be found in the way segments and Fo patterns are aligned in the prosodic stress group. Both regions share with Copenhagen the global signalling of sentence intonation contours, as well as a pronounced reluctance to indicate, with prosodic means, in this style of delivery, the pragmatic, contextually invited focus of the utterance

Intonation and text in Standard Danish

Acoustic analysis of recordings by four Standard Danish speakers shows that each declarative sentence in a text is associated with its own declining intonation contour, but together two or three such contours describe an overall falling slope. Individual sentence intonation contours are steeper and demonstrate greater amounts of resetting between them in a succession of declarative terminal sentences than in a corresponding string of coordinate main clauses. In other words, the closer relation between coordinate structures is reflected in a more coherent or less segregated intonational structure. The results are compared with other languages, and the implications for the abstract representation of Danish intonation are discussed

Stress group patterns, sentence accents and sentence intonation in southern Jutland (Sønderborg and Tønder) - with a view to German

This paper investigates prosodic stress group patterns, the presence and manifestation of default and focal sentence accents and the nature of sentence intonation signalling in Standard Danish spoken on a substratum of South Jutland dialects, viz. Sønderborg and Tønder, and in two varieties of German, Standard North German and Flensburg. The following facts appear: sentence intonation (understood to encompass both utterance function and utterance juncture) is signalled globally in Tønder, locally in Sønderborg, and with a mixture of global and local signalling in German. Default accents are nonexistent in the two Danish varieties, optional in German. Focus is signalled, optionally (and never in final position), by stress reduction of the surroundings in the Danish regions, but is compulsory and takes the shape of a proper sentence accent, though modest, in German. Sønderborg and German have unambiguous final lengthening, whereas both lengthening and shortening finally occurs in Tønder. Prosodic stress group patterns suffer a clean truncation when their duration is shortened in the Danish regions, but a mixture of compression and truncation in German. Finally, Tønder has stød, Sønderborg and (of course) German do not

Sentence intonation in textual context - supplementary data

The experiments presented here follow up a previous investigation (Nina Grønnum Thorsen "Intonation and text in Standard Danish", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 1985, 1205-1216) and were designed to show whether a sequential fundamental frequency lowering of individual sentence components is present in a semantically, but not syntactically, coherent sequence (a text), when the number of sentences exceeds three. The results show that such a sequential lowering may appear, though it is not evenly distributed across the text. However, the textual intonation contour is sensitive, not only to the number of sentences that make up the text, but also to the length of individual sentence components