Compositionality in intonation: Evidence from Greek

Abstract

The autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory of intonational phonology posits that tunes are composed of independent elements, pitch accents and edge tones. However, configurational approaches remain popular, while AM relies on but cannot prove compositionality. We addressed this issue with a corpus of Greek wh-questions (N = 2135), elicited from 18 speakers using a discourse completion task that involved communicative situations resulting in rise-fall-rises or rise-falls. The rise-fall-rises are autosegmentally represented as a L* + H pitch accent on the utterance-initial wh-word, followed by a L- phrase accent and a H% boundary tone; the rise-falls are represented as L + H* L − L%. We applied functional principal component analysis (FPCA), a data-driven method that breaks down curves into components that capture independent modes of curve variation, and followed FPCA with LMEMs on the principal component coefficients. The pitch movement associated with each of the posited tonal elements was captured by a different PC: PC2 captured differences in the extent of the rise and the peak alignment of the pitch accent, PC1 differences in fall steepness, and PC4 the difference between a final rise and low, flat pitch. These results provide prima facie evidence for tune compositionality, since the differences are driven by the analysis not human annotation.