Acoustic cues to Nehiyawewin constituency

Abstract

This study examines how speakers use acoustic cues, e.g., pitch and pausing, to establish syntactic and semantic constituents in Nehiyawewin, an Algonquian language. Two Nehiyawewin speakers autobiographies, which have been recorded, transcribed, and translated by H. C. Wolfart in collaboration with a native speaker of Nehiyawewin, provide natural-speech data for the study. Since it is difficult for a non-native-speaker to reliably distinguish Nehiyawewin constituents, an intermediary is needed. The transcription provides this intermediary through punctuation marks (commas, semi-colons, em-dashes, periods), which have been shown to consistently mark constituency structure [Nunberg, CSLI 1990]. The acoustic cues are thus mapped onto the punctuated constituents, and then similar constituents are compared to see what acoustic cues they share. Preliminarily, the clearest acoustic signal to a constituent boundary is a pitch drop preceding the boundary and/or a pitch reset on the syllable following the boundary. Further, constituent boundaries marked by a period consistently end on a low pitch, are followed by a pitch reset of 30–90 Hz and have an average pause of 1.9 seconds. I also discuss cross-speaker cues, and prosodic cues that do not correlate to punctuation, with implications for the transcriptional view of orthography [Marckwardt, Oxford 1942].