Whole tunes, nuclear and pre-nuclear patterns and prosodic features in the perception of interrogativity and non-finality in dutch.

Abstract

The paper deals with some aspects of production and perception of yes-no questions and non-final clauses in Dutch. The analysis of the prosodic characteristics of naturally produced utterances and the subjects’ responses obtained in the course a series of perception experiments with naturally produced and modified utterances yielded the following conclusions: • the identification of utterance type is to the largest extent determined by the presence of relevant prosodic cues in the nuclear accent • cues to utterance type in the pre-nuclear pattern appear to be used by listeners when the nuclear accent type allows of several possible interpretations • timing of the nuclear accent may be considered a relevant cue to utterance type, «early» vs. «late» rise accounting for «non-final» vs. «interrogative» preferences, «early» vs. «late» fall eliciting «statement» vs. «question/statement» reactions. INTRODUCTION The establishing of a set of categorically distinct intonation units forming the intonation system of a language is still one of the most challenging tasks for linguists. It is not yet clear how exactly the linguistic relevance of a certain type of intonation unit should be tested and some disagreement exists as to what differences should be called categorical rather than gradient [6]. There is no agreement either as to the function of intonation. Are intonation units associated with certain invariant categories of meaning and if so, in what terms should these meaningful distinctions be described? These and other fundamental questions are still open for discussion. At the same time it is evident that intonation is capable of changing the interpretation of an utterance and thus may be said to perform a certain communicative function, which finds its expression, among others, in the specific patterning of various utterance types. Previous research in the intonation of Dutch questions (e.g. [2], [3], [4]) has proved the already reported for other languages founding that the concept of interrogativity is mainly associated with a local terminal rise. Other cues to interrogativity include a raised register and absence of downtrend. Non-finality (or «continuation» we shall leave the terminological discussion beyond the scope of the present work) is also said to be cued by rising pitch. In her work devoted to the melodic marking of continuation versus questions in Dutch [2] J. Caspers claims that while the former are signalled by the accent-lending rise followed by sustained level pitch (1O in the IPO notation [1]), the latter are associated with a combination of an accent-lending rise and a final rise (12). One possible interpretation of these findings is that they provide extra evidence in support of the previously mentioned claim that questions are characterised by higher pitch values than other utterance types. The study reported here is concerned with finding further prosodic cues to non-finality and interrogativity. We limited our research exclusively to pitch characteristics (being fully aware of the communicative importance of other classes of prosodic features). The questions addressed were the following: • What are the most typical intonation patterns realised in non-final clauses and yes-no questions (in terms of nuclear and pre-nuclear patterns and their combinations) • To what extent can the perception of utterance type be influenced by the cues contained in the prenuclear vs. nuclear part of the utterance? • What is the role played by the timing of the nuclear accent in the perception of the utterance type ( Rise 1 vs. 2 and Fall A vs. (1)A in the IPO notation)? EXPERIMENTS 1: ANALYSIS AND PERCEPTION OF (FRAGMENTS OF) NATURALLY PRODUCED UTTERANCES 9 Yes-no questions with the inverted word order and 9 lexically and syntactically identical to them non-final clauses (mostly subordinate clauses of condition and concession also having the inverted word order) were embedded in appropriate contexts, printed on cards and read by 8 native speakers of Dutch (5 male, 3 female). The acquired recordings (144 utterances) were digitised and F0 contours were extracted using speech analysis programs WinCECIL (distributed by SIL as freeware) and PRAAT (developed by P. Boersma and D. Weenink). Pitch patterns produced by the speakers were transcribed using largely the notation developed in the framework of the Dutch School [1], with some modifications introduced in the course of the experimental analysis of the data, and then classified (following the British tradition in intonation analysis [7]) according to the type of nuclear and pre-nuclear pattern and frequency of occurrence in either type of utterance. 6 types of nuclear pitch accents were distinguished («&» means that the pitch movements are associated with one accented syllable, A* is used to indicate a delayed fall not distinguished in the IPO system): IPO Notation: Rise 1 (early ) 1 Rise 2 (late) (a)2, (b)A&2