Intonation contours in Hawai‘i Creole and Hawai‘i English show influence from Hawaiian

Abstract

Hawai‘i Creole (ISO 639-3 hwc) and Hawai‘i English (HE) are speech varieties spoken by local residents of the Hawaiian Islands. Three native speakers of HWC, seven native speakers of HE, and three native speakers of Hawaiian (ISO 639-3 haw) were recorded speaking in casual interviews, participating in map tasks, and saying phonetically controlled sentences. Analysis focused on utterances containing the high (or rise) plus steep fall contour, which is not found in Mainstream American English but is often used for continuations and polar questions in HWC, HE, and Hawaiian (Vanderslice & Pierson 1967, Anderson 2003, Murphy 2013). Results for all three speech varieties showed alignment of F0 minimums with lexically stressed syllables at the end of an intonation phrase, with F0 peaks occurring on immediately preceding syllables. All three speech varieties show a preponderance of this steep drop in continuations and polar questions, confirming the idea that this is a feature borrowed from Hawaiian (Bickerton an...