The Swedish word att /at/ is associated with two grammatical functions: a) (part of) a subordinate conjunction and b) an infinitive marker. This pilot study, with 5 short spontaneous discourses from 3 male speakers shows a correlation between pauses after att, and aspiration of /t/ in att, where aspiration can be interpreted as a kind of final lengthening involving the release phase of the stop consonant. We also show a tendency for att with aspiration to be associated with the grammatical function of subordinate conjunction. Further, we are able to show a tendency for the infinitive marker to be unaspirated in the normal case, while the subordinate conjunctions are characterized by final aspiration in 40 % of the cases

Horne, Merle

Johansson, Victoria

Strömqvist, Sven

English

Lund University Publications

LUND UNIVERSITYPO Box 117221 00 Lund+46 46-222 00 00Final aspiration as a phrase boundary cue in Swedish: the case of att 'that'Johansson, Victoria; Horne, Merle; Strömqvist, Sven2001Link to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Johansson, V., Horne, M., & Strömqvist, S. (2001). Final aspiration as a phrase boundary cue in Swedish: thecase of att 'that'. (Working Papers, Lund University, Dept. of Linguistics; Vol. 49).http://www.ling.lu.se/disseminations/pdf/49/bidrag20.pdfTotal number of authors:3General rightsUnless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply:Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authorsand/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by thelegal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private studyor research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portalRead more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will removeaccess to the work immediately and investigate your claim.Lund University, Dept. of LinguisticsWorking Papers 49 (2001), 78–81Final aspiration as a phrase boundary cue inSwedish: the case of att 'that'Victoria Johansson, Merle Horne and Sven StrömqvistDept. of Linguistics, Lund UniversityVictoria.Johansson@ling.lu.se, Merle.Horne@ling.lu.se, Sven.Stromqvist@ling.lu.seAbstractThe Swedish word att /at/ is associated with two grammatical functions: a) (part of) a sub-ordinate conjunction and b) an infinitive marker. This pilot study, with 5 short spontaneousdiscourses from 3 male speakers shows a correlation between pauses after att, and aspi-ration of /t/ in att, where aspiration can be interpreted as a kind of final lengthening in-volving the release phase of the stop consonant. We also show a tendency for att with aspi-ration to be associated with the grammatical function of subordinate conjunction. Further,we are able to show a tendency for the infinitive marker to be unaspirated in the normalcase, while the subordinate conjunctions are characterized by final aspiration in 40 % ofthe cases.1 IntroductionPrevious studies on phrasing have shown how prosodic cues such as pauses and finallengthening serve to signal boundaries in spoken discourse (Bruce et al 1993; Horne et al1995; Fant & Kruckenberg 1991; Swerts 1997). It has also been observed that even seg-ment-related secondary articulations are often associated with phrase-boundaries (see e.g.Dilly et al 1996 for a discussion of phrase-initial vowel glottalization in English).1.1 PurposeThe goal of this paper is to present pilot data from Swedish that illustrate how segmentalstrengthening (realized as final aspiration in the subordinate conjunction att) can be a usefulcue for detecting clause boundaries in speech recognition and parsing algorithms.1.2 Theoretical backgroundSegmental 'strengthening' and 'weakening' processes are explained by relating their inputand output sound categories to a scale of sonority (for a discussion, see Hyman, 1975).According to the sonority scale, vowels are assumed to be the most sonorant segments,whereas aspirated stops and affricates are the least sonorant segments (see Fig. 1.). Con-sonant strengthening, involving a movement to the left on the sonority scale is often ob-served for example at the beginning of stressed syllables.Figure 1. The sonority scale.In the present study, it will be shown how the strengthening of /t/ in att to a strongly aspi-rated variant occurs in phrase final position in Swedish. This final aspiration can be ana-lysed as signalling the end of a speech fragment which forms part of an uncompleted mes-sage.Aspirated and unaspirated variants of voiceless stops are common in several Germaniclanguages as contextually conditioned variants. Their distribution is highly predictable interms of phonetic context. In English, aspirated variants are observed to occur at the be-FINAL ASPIRATION AS A PHRASE BOUNDARY CUE IN SWEDISH 79ginning of stressed syllables. In Swedish, aspirated stops are also found in this position(Engstrand 1983; Krull 1991), but are even found in "final" (Lindblad, 1998), or"prepausal" (Garlén, 1988) position. Aspirated voiceless stops are characterized by a pe-riod of noisy airflow after the burst that lasts for a considerable period of time. For Swed-ish, the lower boundary for perception of aspiration is about 40 ms (Lindblad, 1998). Be-low that level, aspiration is not perceived.Figure 2: To the left: waveform of [at:h] with final aspiration. To the right: Waveform of[at|] without final aspiration.In Swedish, the sound string /at/ (graphically att) is ambiguous. It can be associated withtwo grammatical functions: 1) infinitive marker corresponding to English 'to' as in att se tosee' and 2) subordinate conjunction corresponding to 'that' as in Anna sa att Maria var sjuk'Anna said that Maria was sick'. In its second function, att is also part of several, morecomplex subordinate conjunctions, e.g., så att 'so that'.In spontaneous speech, att as an infinitive marker is often pronounced as [o:] whereasatt as a conjunction is never reduced to [o:]. There are no clear rules that predict when theinfinitive att is reduced, such as, e.g., infinitive att is not reduced when it is emphasized. Asa conjunction, att can be reduced to [at|] with an unreleased /t/ (see Fig. 2). However, it isvery often realized [ ] (see Fig. 2), or even [ s] a strongly aspirated or affricated longconsonant in this function. Since this aspiration is an easily identifiable acoustic cue, itcould be used in algorithms for speech recognition and understanding. The degree of aspira-tion is observed to vary, however, and we speculate that this variation can be related to thedegree of speech planning.Although att is analyzed syntactically as a conjunction introducing a subordinate clause,it is often realized phonetically at the end of the preceding clause in disfluency contexts.Thus, for speech parsing purposes, att signals that the message is uncomplete and that anew clause is being planned. We further speculate that the degree of aspiration/affricationcan possibly reflect the degree of complexity of the new item being processed.Att is one of the absolute most frequent words in Swedish (Johansson 1999), and bothof its associated grammatical functions occur often. Since the subordinate conjunction attwould normally trigger a more complex construction (i.e., a subordinate clause) than theinfinitive marker att (normally initiating a simple infinitive construction), one could expectmore features of planning to be associated with the former form of att. Such planning fea-tures would be pauses following att, and consonant strengthening in the form of final aspi-rated /t/.2 MethodThe material for this pilot study was collected within the Spencer Project on DevelopingLiteracy in Different Contexts and Different Languages (Berman & Strömqvist, 1999). Thedata consist of five spontaneously spoken discourses from three Swedish males, 25-30years of age. The recordings were made in a sound studio.Prosodic analyses were carried out using the ESPS/waves environment. The duration ofevery occurence of att was measured. Length of aspiration and length of [t] were measured,as well as the duration of pauses and filled pauses following att. In doing this, we were ableto compare length of aspiration a) as part of the whole word [ ], and b) as part of thesegment [ ], in att as a subordinate clause and att as an infinitive marker. This would en-able us to look for a correlation between duration of aspiration and duration of (filled)80 VICTORIA JOHANSSON, MERLE HORNE & SVEN STRÖMQVISTpauses. Following Lindblad (1998) aspiration phases shorter than 35 ms were classified ashaving no aspiration.0102030405060Followed by pause Not followed by pause0102030405060Followed by pause Not followed by pauseFigure 3a (left): Distribution of att followed by a pause and/or with final aspirated /t/ inabsolute numbers. To the left: cases where att is followed by a pause; to the right: caseswhere att is not followed by a pause. The upper, lighter layer shows the cases where thefinal /t/ is not aspirated, whereas the lower, darker layer shows the cases where /t/ is aspi-rated. 3b (right): Distribution of att followed by a pause collapsed over att as infinitivemarker and att as a subordinate conjunction. To the left: cases where att is followed by apause; to the right: cases where att is not followed by a pause. The upper, lighter layershows the number of cases of att as an infinitive marker, whereas the lower, darker layershows the number of cases of att as a subordinate conjunction.3 ResultsIn the five discourses studied, att occurs 99 times. Of these, att functions as a subordinateconjunction in 67 cases, as an infinitive marker in 8 cases, and as part of other, more com-plex subordinate conjunctions in 24 cases. Thus, att as a subordinate conjunction is morefrequent than att as an infinitive marker. (It should be pointed out that an additional 17cases of the infinitive marker occurred in the data in the reduced form [ ].) In what fol-lows, we will only look at the 75 cases where att occurs as a single subordinate conjunctionor before an infinitive.Fig. 3a shows that 18 of the 75 investigated cases of att were followed by a pause. 17 ofthese cases also had an aspirated /t/, which makes a strong implication, i.e. that pauses areconnected with aspiration. However, from a comparision of Fig. 3a and 3b we find that theopposite is not true; of the 57 cases where att was not followed by a pause, 21 of thecases showed final aspiration. Thus, the implication that aspiration automatically leads toa pause following att is not true.4 Discussion and conclusionMany studies have claimed that pauses are used for planning, and that pauses therefore areoften found at clause boundaries (see e.g., Chafe 1979; Beattie 1980). Other studies haveshown that final lengthening signals boundaries in spoken languages (Bruce et al 1993;Horne et al 1995). Aspiration could be considered to be one kind of final lengthening in-volving the release phase of the final stop consonant. This would lead us to look for a cor-relation between pauses and final aspiration, i.e. that an att followed by a pause shouldalso have an aspirated /t/. Indeed, this is what has been observed in this pilot study.Finding this, we can conclude that there is a correlation between pauses and final aspira-tion. When looking at the distribution of the two types of atts followed by a pause, wefind that most of these cases involve att as a subordinate conjunction. Although it is notpossible to prove it statistically, since the number of infinitive atts is so low, we wouldstill like to suggest that att as a subordinate conjunction is more likely to be followed by apause.The question is what happens if we take away the cases where att is followed by apause and see if we can observe any differences in aspiration between att as a subordinateconjunction and att as an infinitive marker.FINAL ASPIRATION AS A PHRASE BOUNDARY CUE IN SWEDISH 81What we find, however, is that 0 % (0 of 6) of the realizations of infinitive att have finalaspiration, while 40 % (21 of 51) of the realizations of att as a subordinate conjunctionhave final aspiration. Although the low number of cases with att as an infinitive markermakes it impossible to run statistics on this result, it is worth stressing the fact that whenthe cases followed by pause were excluded, none of the infinitive atts had final aspiration,while 40 % of the atts as subordinate conjunction had final aspiration.In this study, we have tried to show a correlation between aspirated /t/ in the frequentlyoccurring homonym att in Swedish, and its function as a subordinate conjunction. Al-though this is only a pilot study, it nevertheless suggests that aspiration of final /t/ in attcould be a useful cue in, e.g., developing algorithms for speech recognition and parsing. Ifatt has final aspiration and is followed by a pause it is more likely that we are dealing withthe realization of att as a subordinate conjunction, rather than the realization of att as aninfinitive marker.The tendencies we have found so far show that it would be fruitful to carry out a largerinvestigatation, preferably with more cases of att as an infinitive marker.ReferencesBeattie, G. 1980 "Encoding units in spontaneous speech" in Dechert, H.W. and Raupach,M. (eds) Temporal Variables in Speech, 131-143. The Hague: Mouton.Berman, R.A. and Strömqvist, S. 1999 "Typological Perspectives on developing literacy"in Aisenman, R. (ed). Working papers in Developing Literacy across genres, modalities,and languages. Volume I. Tel Aviv University, Dept. of Linguistics.Bruce, G., Granström, B., Gustafson, K. and House, D. 1993. "Interaction of F0 and dura-tion in the perception of prosodic phrasing in Swedish." Nordic Prosody VI, ed. B.Granström & L. Nord, 7-22. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Chafe, W. 1979. "The flow of thought and the flow of language" in Givón, T. (ed). Dis-course and Syntax Volume 12 of Syntax and Semantics, 159-181. New York: AcademicPress.Dilly, L., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. and Ostendorf, M. 1996. "Glottalization of word-initialvowels as a function of prosodic structure." Journal of Phonetics 24, 423-444.Engstrand, O. 1983. Articulatory coordination in selected VCV utterances: a means-endview. (Ph.D.diss.). Reports from Uppsala University, Dept. of Linguistics (RUUL) 10.Fant, G. & Kruckenberg, A. 1991. "Preliminaries to the study of Swedish prose readingand reading style". STL-QPRS 2.Garlén, C. 1988. Svenskans fonologi. Lund: Studentlitteratur.Horne, M., Strangert, E., and Heldner, M. 1995. "Prosodic boundary strength in Swedish:final lengthening and silent interval duration." Proceedings of the XIIIth InternationalCongress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm, 170-173.Hyman, L. 1975. Phonology. Theory and analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston.Johansson, V. 1999. "Word frequencies in speech and writing: a study of expository dis-course" in Aisenman, R. (ed). Working papers in Developing Literacy across Genres,Modalities, and Languages. Volume I. Tel Aviv University, Dept. of Linguistics.Krull, D. 1991. "VOT in spontaneous speech and in citation form words" Phonetic Ex-perimental Research, PERILUS Volume XII, Institute of Linguistics, University ofStockholm, 101-107.Lindblad, P. 1998. Talets akustik och perception. Gothenburg University, Dept. of Lin-guistics.Swerts, M. 1997. "Prosodic features at discourse boundaries of different strength." Jour-nal of the Acoustical Society of America 101, 514-521.

Final aspiration as a phrase boundary cue in Swedish: the case of att 'that'

https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/6191622/624501.pdf

Final aspiration as a phrase boundary cue in Swedish: the case of att 'that'

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Lund University Publications