Abstract
Talkers and hearers of Anyi, a West African language of the Akan family, are very adept at discriminating between sentences containing verbs conjugated in the indicative, the intentional, and the subjunctive moods just by relying on subtle variations in pitch. A phonetic investigation is undertaken to determine as precisely as possible the acoustic cues that contribute the most to intelligibility. Ten speakers produced five sentences each in all three moods for a total of 150 utterances. The tone bearing units (TBU) on the subject pronoun and the disyllabic verbs are analyzed acoustically. The acoustic correlates investigated are F0, intensity, and duration. All in all, 810 TBUS are measured. The main findings are as follows. The F0 of the subject pronoun and of the verb are the most robust cues for discriminating between the declarative and the intentional moods. The differentiation between the intentional and the subjunctive moods rests principally on the F0 of the subject pronoun. The distinction betwe...
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