Abstract
Intonation is the phonologically structured variation in phonetic features, primarily pitch, to express phrase-level meanings. As in other speech sound domains, analyzing intonation involves mapping continuously variable physical parameters to categories. The categories of intonation are organized in a set of relations and rule-governed distributions that define the intonation system of a language. From physical realizations, as shown by pitch tracks, surface or phonetic tonal patterns can be identified in terms of tonal targets. Whether surface patterns correspond or not to categories within a given intonation system requires looking at their distributions and contrastiveness. In this paper, I assume the view that a transcription is an analysis of the intonation system, which ultimately aims to identify the contrastive intonation categories of a given language and establish how they signal meaning. Under this view, it is crucial to discuss the ways surface pitch patterns and structural pitch patterns (or phonological categories) are related. Given that intonational analysis is driven by system-internal considerations and that cues to a given category can vary across languages, it is also important to address the issue of how a language-specific transcription can be reconciled with the need and ability to do cross-language comparison of intonation. Bearing on these two issues, I discuss surface and structure in intonational analysis, drawing on mismatches between (dis)similarities in the phonetics and phonology of pitch contours, across languages and language varieties.
Highlights
In the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology, intonation refers to the structured variation in phonetic features, primarily pitch, to express phrase-level meanings
A number of contours that arguably look the same, especially across languages and language varieties, have been under debate as to how they are analyzed and transcribed. One example of such a debate concerns the rise‐fall pitch pattern found in the narrow focus contours in some languages/varieties; another concerns the rise followed by a step down from the high level to a sustained pitch which is found in calling contours in several languages (e.g., Gussenhoven, 2008; Ladd, 2008)
The peak shows later alignment into the nuclear syllable if the narrow focused word initiates the intonational phrase (IP). All these peak alignment differences are clearly context-dependent and predictable given the distribution of the nuclear falls as initial or final nuclei: late initial peak placement is triggered by a preceding prosodic edge, and early final peak placement is triggered by a following prosodic edge
Summary
In the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology, intonation refers to the structured variation in phonetic features, primarily pitch, to express phrase-level meanings. The complex and non-trivial ways that structural pitch patterns and surface pitch patterns may be related underscore the key role played by distribution, context, contrast, and meaning in the analysis and transcription of intonation This is a central issue that the analyses discussed in this paper, relating to mismatches between (dis)similarities in the surface pitch forms and in the phonological categories, will illustrate. The study of comparative intonation requires us to address the relation between surface pitch patterns and structural pitch patterns in order to establish what counts as the same contour phonologically and what should be given the same transcription, within each language-specific system but with an eye on the systems of other languages or varieties This task is especially relevant for typological purposes, since, as argued in Hyman (2012), “the central goal of phonological typology is to determine how different languages systematize the phonetic substance available to all languages”
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