Some suprasegmental characteristics of relative clauses in English

Abstract

Early investigations of the suprasegmental characteristics of relative clauses in English depended primarily on the intuitions of the analyst or on his perception of intonation contours. More recent studies have overlooked what may be significant variables affecting the suprasegmental characteristics of relative clauses. In contrast, the present study attempts: (1) to identify suprasegmental characteristics of relative clauses through spectrographic analysis; (2) to determine the effects of variations in clause type (restrictive/nonrestrictive), word order (SVO/OSV), and relative pronouns ( who ( m )/ that /∅) on intonation; (3) to determine if predictable characteristics of relative clauses are a function of underlying or surface syntactic structure. Two speakers of American English produced the sentence: Gigolos who prefer blondes are fickle and all grammatical permutations of the relative clause within it, in three conditions, for a total of 60 tokens. From spectrograms of each token, three measurements were made: pitch fluctuation and vowel length in the head NP of the clause and in the last word in the clause, and the pause length preceding and following the clause. The results suggest three conclusions: (1) relative clauses exhibit systematic suprasegmental features which can be described in terms of pitch, vowel length, and pause length; (2) clause type and word order are the major determinants of suprasegmental variations; (3) these variations are determined by underlying structure, not by surface structure.