Deme, Andrea

Kleber, Felicitas

Kohári, Anna

Mády, Katalin

Reichel, Uwe D.

Szalontai, Ádám

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Prominence-lending boundaries: pauses and their magnifying powerK. Ma´dy1, F. Kleber2, U. D. Reichel1, A´. Szalontai1, A. Koha´ri1, A. Deme31Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2LMU Munich, 3Eo¨tvo¨s Lora´nd UniversityIntroduction. Hungarian is a prosodically left-headed language with accentualphrases (AP), i.e. prominent words occur at the left-edge of APs [2]. Prominence onone edge may be accompanied by boundary signals such as pauses or lengthening at theother edge of the AP [4]. It was observed by [5] that Hungarian speakers often insertedpauses before emphasized words, thereby initiating a new AP. It could be a potentialstrategy to enhance the prominence of a word by inserting a boundary before it, sincethe initial word of an AP automatically receives prominence due to the language’s left-headed structure. The present study tests this hypothesis by comparing Hungarian withGerman which is right-headed and has no APs [3]. We thus expect stronger boundarysignals in front of prominent words in Hungarian than in German.Experiment. Ten Hungarian and eight German female participants were presentedon a computer screen with five fruits divided into two baskets (see [7] for details). Thepresent analysis focusses on the set in which the first basket contained three fruits ofwhich the first and third fruit were always small, and the size of the second fruit (Hun-garian /m6ngo:/, German /mand@l/) varied (small vs. big). Participants were askedto name the fruits in the order of appearance (which was kept identical throughout theexperiment) from left to right such that another person could tell the size of the secondfruit by listening to the audio recording. The data set contained 432 realisations (4 se-quences × 6 repetitions × 18 speakers). Linear mixed models were computed for eachlanguage separately with the size of the second fruit in the first basket as the fixed effect,participant, repetition and the size of the fourth and fifth fruit in the second basket asrandom effects and the following measures as dependent variables: (1) duration of pausesbefore and after the second fruit (presence and strength of the boundary), (2) duration ofthe final syllable before the second fruit (3) and within the second fruit, and (4) durationof the initial stressed syllable of the second fruit.Results. As opposed to German speakers, Hungarians frequently produced pausesbefore the second fruit (Hungarian: 62%, German: 4%) and even more so when it waslarge (see Table 1). In addition, the duration of these pauses was significantly longerbefore big fruits in Hungarian (t = 9.2, p < 0.001). Unexpectedly, Hungarians alsofrequently inserted pauses after the second fruit (77%), their durations being again sig-nificantly longer in the context of large objects (t = 10.7, p < 0.001). Pre-boundarylengthening before big fruits occurred only in Hungarian (t = 4.16, p < 0.001), but not inGerman (t = 1.4, p < 0.16; see Fig. 1, left). The final syllable of big fruits was lengthenedin both languages (t = 12.5 for Hungarian, t = 6.0 for German, both p < 0.001; see Fig. 1,centre), which might be a domain-edge effect for large objects in both languages (t = 11.2for Hungarian, t = 12.5 for German, both p < 0.001), accompanied by a domain-headeffect, i.e. the lengthening of the accented syllable in large fruits (see Fig. 1, right) [1].Discussion. The frequent occurrence of pauses in Hungarian supports the assump-tion that in this language each accented word starts an AP on its own [6, 2]. In German,pauses are infrequent, and their presence is restricted to the right edge of a prominentword. We conclude that in Hungarian, boundaries at the left edge of a prominent word(here: the big fruit), both in terms of pauses and their durations and of pre-boundarylengthening are utilised for prominence strengthening. In German, lower-level boundariesdo not seem to play an important role in prominence marking.before second fruit after second fruitsmall big small bigHungarian 59 92 83 103German 0 7 5 34Table 1: Occurrence of pauses before and after the 2nd fruit depending on the fruit sizein German and Hungarian.llllll0.hu 1.hu 0.de 1.de0.100.150.200.250.30final syllable in fruit 10: small fruit, 1: large fruitduration (sec)HungarianGermanlllllllllllll0.hu 1.hu 0.de 1.de0.20.40.60.8final syllable in fruit 20: small fruit, 1: large fruitduration (sec)HungarianGermanllllllll0.hu 1.hu 0.de 1.de0.200.250.300.350.400.450.50accented syllable in fruit 20: small fruit, 1: large fruitduration (sec)HungarianGermanFigure 1: Left: final lengthening before the left edge of fruit 2. Centre: Final lengtheningafter the right edge of fruit 2. Right: Lengthening due to prominence in the stressedsyllable of fruit 2.References[1] Beckman, M., Edwards, J. 1994. Articulatory evidence for differentiating stress categories. In:Keating, P. A., (ed), Papers in Laboratory Phonology 3. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P. 7–33.[2] Benˇusˇ, Sˇ., Reichel, U. D., Ma´dy, K. 2014. Modeling accentual phrase intonation in Slovak andHungarian. Veselovska´, L., Janebova´, M., (eds), Complex Visibles Out There. Proceedings of theOlomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2014. Olomouc. Palacky´ University 677–689.[3] Grice, M., Baumann, S., Benzmu¨ller, R. 2005. German intonation in autosegmental-metrical phonol-ogy. In: Jun, S.-A., (ed), Prosodic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press 55–83.[4] Jun, S.-A., Fletcher, J. 2015. Methodology of studying intonation: From data collection to dataanalysis. In: Prosodic Typology II: the new development in the phonology of intonation and phrasing.Oxford: University Press 493–519.[5] Ma´dy, K., Kleber, F. 2010. Variation of pitch accent patterns in Hungarian. Proc. 5th Speech ProsodyConference, Chicago 100924:1–4.[6] Ma´dy, K., Szalontai, A., Deme, A., Sura´nyi, B. 2013. On the interdepencende of prosodic phrasingand prosodic prominence in Hungarian. Proc. 11th International Conference on the Structure ofHungarian Piliscsaba, Hungary.[7] Reichel, U., Ma´dy, K., Kleber, F. 2016. How prominence and prosodic phrasing interact. In: Jokisch,O., (ed), Elektronische Sprachverarbeitung 2016 volume 81 of Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation.Dresden, Germany: TUDpress 153–159.

Prominence-lending boundaries : pauses and their magnifying power

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