Boundary tones as gestures: Coordination relations at boundaries.

Abstract

While the temporal properties of prosodic boundaries are fairly well understood, tonal events at boundaries (phrase accents and boundary tones) have received less attention. The present study, conducted within the articulatory phonology framework [cf. Browman and Goldstein (1989)], is a first investigation of the coordination of boundary tone gestures to constriction gestures. An articulatory magnetometer study probes this coordination in a variety of constructions in Greek (causatives, yes‐no questions, imperative requests, and wh‐questions). The effects of stress (levels: zero, one or two syllables before the boundary) and accent (levels: accented versus deaccented utterance‐final word) are examined. Results from two speakers analyzed to date indicate that the boundary tone coordinates with the onset’s release gesture or the nucleus’ opening gesture of the utterance‐final syllable. The presence of accent does not affect these coordination relations, while stress does. Specifically, the latter affects the lag between the onset of the consonant gesture and the onset of the vowel gesture, and the lag between the onset of the consonant gesture and the onset of the boundary tone gesture. Such findings imply that boundary tones, albeit postlexical events, affect the intrasyllabic gestural coordination. An alternative possibility is that tonal and temporal events at prosodic boundaries interact. [Work supported by NIH.]