Evidence for levels of prosodic hierarchies in Swedish

Abstract

Pierrehumbert and her colleagues have proposed a model of prosodic organization that utilizes not only types of constituents and their marker(s), but also well‐defined edges. Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986) have suggested that, in English, the phrase tone following the nuclear accent marks the right edge of an intermediate phrase (ip), giving evidence of phrasing internal to the intonational phrase (IP). Beckman and Edwards (1987) account for a final lengthening effect in English as one marker of the edge of the IP. Swedish differs from English in that sentence accent does not occur at a phrase edge. Thus, if there is a level at which there is one and only one sentence accent, utterances with single terminal junctures and multiple phrase tones must be analyzed as having one IP with multiple ip's. But there is no tonal marker for the edges of the ip's. An experiment has been constructed (in progress) to test the hypothesis that lengthening will occur at the end of the IP and, to a lesser extent, the ip, a...