Prosodic Typology Research Articles

Prominence and intonation in Singapore English

Previous work on Singapore English prosody has focused largely on establishing the acoustic correlates of lexical stress and examining where the language falls within a rhythm-class typology. Little attention, however, has been paid to how lexical prominence, if present, interacts with phrasal prominence. In this study, we examine the extent to which f0 realizations vary across lexical items with differing stress patterns, while taking into account that prosodic phrasing requirements necessitate an f0 rise to the phrase-final syllable. We show that across target types of varying stress placement, syllable length, and constituency, f0 realizations are highly consistent, involving a rise from the start of the target word or phrase which culminates with a peak on the phrase-final syllable. The location of lexical prominence is the primary influence on the scaling of f0 across the entire target, with stress-initial targets having a higher mean f0. Exploratory analysis of duration and intensity measures further corroborates the prominence-lending nature of the phrase-final syllable, with some evidence for marking of prominence on non-final lexically stressed syllables. The findings support the primarily post-lexical role that f0 plays in marking phrase edges, instead of lexical heads, in Singapore English, in line with a previously proposed AM model of Singapore English intonation. The implications of these findings for the study of prosodic typology and sociolinguistic variation in Singapore English are also discussed.

Exploring macro-rhythm in African American English

This study contributes to a growing body of research on quantifying the theory of macro-rhythm, a model of prosodic typology proposed by Sun-Ah Jun (2014) that looks at the global pitch patterns of an utterance, through comparing African American English (AAE) to Mainstream (white) US English (MUSE). Based on prior research on intonation, rhythm, and prosody in AAE (cf. Thomas, 2015 for a thorough overview), we predicted that AAE would have stronger macro-rhythm than MUSE, such that speakers would produce higher peaks and lower valleys, pitch excursions of greater magnitude, have a greater consistency in slope, a greater frequency of high (H) and low (L) pitch targets, and more regular spacing of these pitch targets. Data weretaken from the Valdosta group of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) for Black speakers and the Buckeye corpus for white speakers. Contrary to our expectations, Buckeye speakers proved to be more macro-rhythmic than their CORAAL counterparts in all but one metric, but these results confirm that macro-rhythm is a viable method for cross-dialectal analysis as it reveals quantifiable differences between speaker dialect groups of the same language.

Prosodic Prominence Across Languages

Current empirical work on prosodic prominence is based on theoretical developments in the mid-twentieth century, in which a generalized notion of stress (in word pairs like English insight/incite and in sentence pairs like THEY left/they LEFT) was replaced by a distinction between an abstract notion of word stress and a concrete notion of phrasal accent or prominence that applies to specific words in an utterance. Much research since then has focused on phonetic and other cues that signal such prominence. Early findings emphasized the role of intonational pitch movements; more recent research demonstrates the importance of other phonetic cues, categorical differences between pitch movement types, and nonphonetic factors like word frequency. However, the definition of prominence itself remains informal and depends on intuitions that are well motivated primarily in European languages. Recent findings point to important differences between languages. These might be accommodated in a more comprehensive theory of word and sentence stress that treats both as manifestations of a hierarchical prosodic structure of the sort assumed in metrical phonology, while at the same time allowing for significant differences of prosodic typology.

Prosodic Morphology of Verb and Adjective Syllables in Yi

Prosodic morphology is an important research object of prosodic typology, and also one of the important elements of prosody and morphology. This paper briefly discusses the prosodic form of the Yi language in terms of the number of syllables in verbs and adjectives. Pure verbs in Yi language usually appear in the form of single syllables. When restricted in grammatical activities, they are always flexibly used by adding the number of syllables, the most obvious one being nominalization. There are two types of adjectives in the Yi language, namely property adjective and state adjective. They can be mainly differentiated in terms of the syllable numbers of a word: the property adjectives are often monosyllabic, while the state adjectives are polysyllabic. The category of level is also expressed by adjusting the number of syllables. The more syllables, the greater the category of level change.

Word-Prosodic Typology and the Traps of False Similarity: Japanese and Slovene

The article briefly describes the historical development of language prosodic typology, introduces the two word-prosodic prototypes proposed by Hyman, and explains the positioning of pitch-accent languages on the lexical level. It points out the false similarity between Japanese and Slovene that was created with the introduction of the feature [±culminative] and proposes to expand it with the feature [±eliminative], which phonetically justifies the difference between pitch-accent systems and the stress-accent prototype.

The acoustics of plosives and the formation of prosodic structure in Polish

Abstract The aim of this acoustic study of voiced and voiceless word-initial plosives is to establish the nature of the relationship between prosodic positions, accent, and segmental phonetics in Polish. Four different acoustic parameters were investigated (VOT, pitch, F1, and preceding vowel’s duration). The results show rather modest effects of prosodic position. The findings are interpreted with reference to the prosodic typology posited in the Onset Prominence representational framework (OP), in which prosodic domains are not imposed from above but rather are formed according to opposing mechanisms of ‘submersion’ and ‘adjunction’. The findings support the claim that Polish belongs to the latter category, in which only modest effects of position are expected.

Automatic categorization of prosodic contours in Bardi

This study presents preliminary results of an automated prosodic clustering analysis of Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language from Northern Australia, using methods from Kaland (2021). Previous work on Bardi prosody identified several functions of boundary tones and two main phrase types, but stressed that findings were preliminary. Here we extend that work and show evidence for several additional phrase types, as well as confirming the overall accuracy of automated clustering. This work adds to the prosodic typology of Australian languages (cf. Fletcher et al. 2002) and provides further evidence for the functions of intonation beyond demarcation in these languages. When coupled with evaluation by a knowledgeable researcher, this automated approach can greatly expedite prosodic analysis on a large scale and expand our typology of prosodic systems.

Pitch Accent Distribution and Focus Structure in Taifi Arabic: A Production Study

Prosodic encoding of focus in Taifi Arabic is not yet fully understood. A recent production study found significant acoustic differences between syntactically identical sentences with information focus, contrastive focus and without focus. This paper presents results from a production experiment investigating whether information and contrastive focus have prosodic effects on the pitch-accent distributions. Using question-answer paradigms, 16 native speakers of Taifi Arabic were asked to read three target sentences in different focus conditions. Results reveal that every content word is pitch-accented in utterances with and without focus. However, there are very few cases (23.12%) in which the post-focus words are deaccented. The largest percentage of deaccentuation was observed in the utterances with initial contrastive focus. The results show that focus structures in Taifi Arabic show both deaccentuation and post-focus compression. Therefore, the prosodic realization of focus in Taifi Arabic is different from their counterparts in other Arabic dialects such as Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. These findings have an important implication for both the prosodic typology and focus typology.

Intonational phonology of Farasani Arabic: intonation ignores stress unless a word is focused

This study proposes an Autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology of Farasani Arabic, an under-documented dialect of Arabic spoken in the Farasan Islands, Saudi Arabia. Tonal patterns of utterances, produced in neutral and narrow focus contexts, were examined by varying the length of a word and a phrase, the location of stress, syntactic structures, and sentence types. Results suggest that Farasani Arabic has three prosodic units higher than a word: Intonational Phrase > Intermediate Phrase > Accentual Phrase (AP). An AP is defined by a rising tonal pattern, [L Ha], without including a pitch accent, even though the language has stress. This is unique among Arabic dialects and also typologically unusual. So far, only a few languages (e.g., Kuot, Uyghur) have been claimed to be an exception to the association between stress and intonational pitch accent. A further unique feature of Farasani Arabic is that a pitch accent (H*) does occur on the stressed syllable of a word when the word is emphasized (in this case, the AP final tone is Low, i.e., [L H* La]). In other words, stress is partially involved in the intonation system of Farasani Arabic, further challenging the current models of intonational phonology and prosodic typology.

A cross-linguistic comparison on the use of acoustic cues for ambiguity resolution

In producing structurally ambiguous sentences, speakers often rely on prosodic acoustic cues (duration, pitch, and intensity) to enhance communication. This study compared speakers of two typologically different languages in their use of these cues for ambiguity resolution. Ten English and 10 Korean speakers completed a production task in their native language. Stimulus sentences included a relative clause which could modify either the first or the second noun (e.g., the boss of the clerk who was dishonest). The participants produced each sentence twice, being directed each time to convey one or the other of the two possible meanings. English speakers used both prosodic boundary cues, by inserting pause between words, and word prominence, by producing greater pitch movement and intensity on the heads of prosodic phrases. Korean speakers, on the other hand, used pre-boundary word lengthening and pause to mark prosodic phrase boundaries but did not use pitch or intensity to manipulate word prominence. These results suggest that the prosodic typology of languages (e.g., head-prominence vs. edge-prominence) influences the interface between syntax and phonology.In producing structurally ambiguous sentences, speakers often rely on prosodic acoustic cues (duration, pitch, and intensity) to enhance communication. This study compared speakers of two typologically different languages in their use of these cues for ambiguity resolution. Ten English and 10 Korean speakers completed a production task in their native language. Stimulus sentences included a relative clause which could modify either the first or the second noun (e.g., the boss of the clerk who was dishonest). The participants produced each sentence twice, being directed each time to convey one or the other of the two possible meanings. English speakers used both prosodic boundary cues, by inserting pause between words, and word prominence, by producing greater pitch movement and intensity on the heads of prosodic phrases. Korean speakers, on the other hand, used pre-boundary word lengthening and pause to mark prosodic phrase boundaries but did not use pitch or intensity to manipulate word prominence. These...

Differences in prosodic phrasing in marking syntax vs. focus: Data from Yanbian Korean

Abstract In studying the effect of syntax and focus on prosodic phrasing, the main issue of investigation has been to explain and predict the location of a prosodic boundary, and not much attention has been given to the nature of prosodic phrasing. In this paper, we offer evidence from intonation patterns of utterances that prosodic phrasing can be formed differently phonologically and phonetically due to its function of marking syntactic structure vs. focus (prominence) in Yanbian Korean, a lexical pitch accent dialect of Korean spoken in the northeastern part of China, just above North Korea. We show that the location of a H tone in syntax-marking Accentual Phrase (AP) is determined by the type of syntactic head, noun or verb (a VP is marked by an AP-initial H while an NP is marked by an AP-final H), while prominence-marking accentual phrasing is cued by AP-initial H. The difference in prosodic phrasing due to its dual function in Yanbian Korean is compared with that of Seoul Korean, and a prediction is made on the possibility of finding such difference in other languages based on the prosodic typology proposed in (Jun, Sun-Ah. 2014b. Prosodic typology: by prominence type, word prosody, and macro-rhythm. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.), Prosodic Typology II: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. 520–539. Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Lexical tone or foot structure in Hong Kong English? A response to Lian-Hee Wee

As is common in work on prosodic typology, the notions 'tone' and 'stress' play a key role in Wee's 2016 study of the tone system of Hong Kong English (HKE). Based on the absence of phonetic correlates of stress and the distribution of tone in polysyllabic words, Wee claims that HKE must have lexical (high) tone. In this reply, we argue that, even in the absence of phonetic correlates of stress, foot structure provides a more parsimonious account of the distribution of surface tones. Multiple high tones within words follow from predictable morphological structure and/or tonal spreading, rather than from lexical tone.

The Effect of Focus and Phrase Position on East Norwegian Lexical Tonal Accents

Two experiments examined the acoustic correlates of the disyllabic tonal accent contrast in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian, and how narrow focus and phrasal position shape the contrast. Production results showed that both tonal accents have a high-low (HL) pitch contour, with different timing. In narrow focus, the pitch contrast was enlarged through asymmetrical F0 changes. When at the right edge of an accent phrase (AP), the accents were shown to have a higher L, lower AP H% tone, shorter stressed vowel, and longer final vowel. The alignment changes reflected tonal crowding while segmental modifications were due to the phrase-final lengthening in AP-final position. This work contributes to the literature on prosodic typology as well as on the implementation of prosodic focus and sentence intonation in languages with lexical pitch contrasts.

How Truncating Are ‘Truncating Languages'? Evidence from Russian and German

Russian and German have pr eviously been described as ‘truncating‘, or cutting off target frequencies of the phrase-final pitch trajectories when the time available for voicing is compromised. However, supporting evidence is rare and limited to only a few pitch categories. This paper reports a production study conducted to document pitch adjustments to linguistic materials, in which the amount of voicing available for the realization of a pitch pattern varies from relatively long to extremely short. Productions of nuclear H+L*, H* and L*+H pitch accents followed by a low boundary tone were investigated in the two languages. The results of the study show that speakers of both ‘truncating languages' do not utilize truncation exclusively when accommodating to different segmental environments. On the contrary, they employ several strategies - among them is truncation but also compression and temporal re-alignment - to produce the target pitch categories under increasing time pressure. Given that speakers can systematically apply all three adjustment strategies to produce some pitch patterns (H* L% in German and Russian) while not using truncation in others (H+L* L% particularly in Russian), we question the effectiveness of the typological classification of these two languages as ‘truncating'. Moreover, the phonetic detail of truncation varies considerably, both across and within the two languages, indicating that truncation cannot be easily modeled as a unified phenomenon. The results further suggest that the phrase-final pitch adjustments are sensitive to the phonological composition of the tonal string and the status of a particular tonal event (associated vs. boundary tone), and do not apply to falling vs. rising pitch contours across the board, as previously put forward for German. Implications for the intonational phonology and prosodic typology are addressed in the discussion.

Sincronia gesto-fala na emergência da fluência infantil

Apresentaremos e discutiremos neste trabalho o conceito de multimodalidade inserido nas pesquisas em aquisição da linguagem. Entendemos, portanto, a multimodalidade como uma via de observação e análise da língua(gem) através de elementos multimodais que compõem esta (língua)gem, isto é, a fala, o gesto e o olhar (CAVALCANTE, 2009; ÁVILA-NÓBREGA, 2010; BARROS, 2012; CAVALCANTE et al. 2005). Tomamos como base teórica para as análises multimodais a classificação dos gestos proposta por McNeill (1985, 1992); a tipologia prosódica de Barros (2012) e a discussão sobre envelope multimodal de Ávila-Nóbrega e Cavalcante (2012a). Além disso, discutiremos como dispomos nossos dados para análise no software ELAN e apresentaremos dados de uma díade mãe-criança analisados sob esta perspectiva.

A study of Prosodic Typology in Chinese tone and Korean dialects’ tone

A study of Prosodic Typology in Chinese tone and Korean dialects’ tone

Tonal Targets in Early Child English, Spanish, and Catalan

This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children - nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking - between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to the adult target speech provided by their mothers, and to a dataset of adult-directed speech recorded at a later stage for the purpose of measuring pitch height. A corpus of 624 utterances was elicited using a controlled naming task and analysed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework. Measuring the pitch height and pitch timing of nuclear pitch accents, we found that once the effects of syllable duration are accounted for, young children reach tonal targets with remarkable precision. Overall, the results indicate that the phonetic aspects of intonation are acquired from a very early age. Even the youngest children show adult-like alignment of the low target, although mastery of the high target increases with age. Young Spanish-speaking children, however, show a more precise attainment of pitch scaling and alignment of their (high) tonal targets than do Catalan and English children; where the ambient language lies within a general prosodic typology appears to influence the acquisition of tonal targets.

Stress-timed = word-based? Testing a hypothesis in prosodic typology

Abstract In recent research on cross-linguistic differences in linguistic rhythm, it has been hypothesized that the traditional dichotomy ‘stress-timed’ versus ‘syllable-timed’ might be recast with respect to which level of the Prosodic Hierarchy constitutes the most prominent domain for the organization of prosodic structure. In this paper, we test the prediction that ‘stress-timed’ languages are characterized by a dominance of the prosodic word against a typological sample of 58 languages. Although there is a slight cross-linguistic tendency in favor of the prediction, there is no statistical support for the proposed correlation. Since counterexamples include not only individual languages but also entire language families, we advocate a different view on prosodic word domain structure. The prosodic word profile of a given language is more reliably predicted by the family membership of that language than by universal correlations concerning its rhythm class membership. We substantiate this claim by a survey of Mon-Khmer’s family signature on prosodic word domain structure in Mon, where sound patterns target either the monosyllabic stem or the maximally inflected disyllabic word.

Prosodic typology in Japanese dialects from a cross-linguistic perspective

In the typology of prosodic phrasing in Japanese dialects that the author has proposed previously, the dialects are categorized into those in which an accentual phrase (AP) generally contains only one word, and those in which it can contain two or more words. This paper shows that this typology can be applied to languages that have the same sort of AP as in Japanese, such as Seoul Korean, French and Northern Bizkaian Basque. It is also shown that the cross-linguistic difference similar to that in AP-level prosodic phrasing can also be observed in languages in which AP is difficult to define, such as English and Spanish. In order to describe these languages in a unified framework, it is proposed that they be divided according to how densely pitch events (such as post-lexical pitch accents and AP boundaries) are distributed with respect to the number of words. This division may hold a clue to language-specific mapping between prosody and syntax/focus.

In defense of prosodic typology: A response to Beckman and Venditti

In two recent handbook articles, Beckman & Venditti (2010, 2011) present overviews of tone and intonation which take issue with both traditional typology and recent attempts to bring clarity to the study of prosodic typology. In the course of their coverage Beckman & Venditti question the “usefulness” of distinguishing prosodic systems by “tonemic function alone” (e.g., lexical tone, stress, intonation) and raise the question “Is typology needed?” Within this context I once again argue for a “property-driven” approach to prosodic typology whose goal is not to classify languages into prosodic types, rather to accurately characterize the same vs. different ways in which prosodic properties are exploited. We thus ask (i) whether a given language has word-level contrastive pitch (“tone”), word-level metrical structure (“stress”), both, or neither; (ii) if yes, what does the prosodic system do with the tones and/or stress, both at the word level and postlexically? Given the level-ordered nature of phonological systems, only after the first two questions are dealt with can we move on to the the question with which Beckman & Venditti are most concerned: (iii) how are the surface or output word-prosodic properties integrated with phrase- and utterance-level intonation? While Beckman & Venditti question the usefulness of “broad-stroke typologies” which have traditionally distinguished tone, stress, and intonation, their disposition to minimize systemic differences in favor of surface comparisons of phonetic realizations raises important questions concerning levels of representation and the nature of phonological typology itself.