Prosody And Syntax: Cross-linguistic Perspectives (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Prosody and Syntax Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics Volume 3 Prosody and Syntax: Cross-linguistic Perspectives E...

Author: Yuji Kawaguchi | Ivan Fonagy | Tsunekazu Moriguchi

152 downloads 2460 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Prosody and Syntax

Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics

Volume 3 Prosody and Syntax: Cross-linguistic Perspectives Edited by Yuji Kawaguchi, Ivan Fonágy and Tsunekazu Moriguchi

Prosody and Syntax Cross-linguistic Perspectives

Edited by

Yuji Kawaguchi Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Ivan Fonágy Hungarian Academy, C.N.R.S.

Tsunekazu Moriguchi Shizoka University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prosody and Syntax : Cross-linguistic Perspectives / edited by Yuji Kawaguchi, Ivan Fonágy and Tsunekazu Moriguchi. p. cm. (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics, issn in appl. ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Prosodic analysis (Linguistics). 2. Grammar, Comparative and general. P224.P756 2006 414/.6--dc22 isbn 90 272 3315 2 (Hb; alk. paper)

2006042762

© 2006 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Contents Message from the President Setsuho IKEHATA (President, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) ............................ 1 Center of Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI) Yuji KAWAGUCHI......................................................................................................... 3 Preface Yuji KAWAGUCHI........................................................................................................11 Functions of Intonation Ivan FÓNAGY and Eva BÉRARD ............................................................................... 19 Prosodic Constituents in French —A Data-Driven Approach— Jacqueline VAISSIÈRE and Alexis MICHAUD ........................................................... 47 A Predictive Approach to the Analysis of Intonation in Discourse in French Piet MERTENS............................................................................................................ 65 English and German Prosody —A Contrastive Comparison— Manfred MARKUS .................................................................................................... 103 Nuclear-Stress Placement by Japanese Learners of English —Transfer from Japanese— Hiroko SAITO............................................................................................................ 125 Mismatch of Stress and Accent in Spoken Spanish Takuya KIMURA ....................................................................................................... 141 Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb —How Morphology and Phonology Interact— Joaquim Brandão de CARVALHO ............................................................................ 157 Intonational Patterns in Russian Interrogatives —Phonetic Analyses and Phonological Interpretations— Yosuke IGARASHI ..................................................................................................... 175 Sociolinguistic Characteristics of Intonation Fumio INOUE ........................................................................................................... 197 Interaction between Phonetic Features and Accent-Placement in Japanese Family Names Hirokazu SATO.......................................................................................................... 223 The Intonation of Interrogative Utterances in the Japanese Dialogs —Analysis of the “TUFS Language Module”— Mieko TAKADA and Takako AYUSAWA .................................................................... 239 The Prosody of Auxiliaries in Seoul Korean Akira UTSUGI and Hideki NOMA ............................................................................ 265 On the Nature of Rules Sensitive to Syntax —The Case of Makonde Tonology— Cédric PATIN and Annie RIALLAND........................................................................ 285 An Acoustic Study on Intonation of Nominal Sentences in Indonesian Masashi FURIHATA.................................................................................................. 303 Acoustic and Structural Analysis of Enclitic Particles in Tagalog Tsunekazu MORIGUCHI........................................................................................... 327 Intonation Patterns of Turkish Interrogatives Yuji KAWAGUCHI, Selim YILMAZ and Arsun Uras YILMAZ................................... 349 Index of Proper Nouns ........................................................................................................ 369 Index of Subjects ................................................................................................................ 375 Contributors ........................................................................................................................ 383

Message from the President Setsuho IKEHATA (President, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) The 21st Century COE (“Center of Excellence”) Program, launched by the Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology in 2002, grants subsidies to distinguished universities in our country for the establishment of a center of research and education in various fields with the highest academic standards in the world. It aims at raising the level of research in our country’s universities and fostering creative academic minds, expected to become leaders of the world. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) submitted applications for research projects in two of the selected programs—the Humanities and Interdisciplinary/Compound/New Sphere fields. We have obtained wonderful results; both projects were selected. We are extremely pleased and encouraged by this high evaluation of the unique research projects and educational potential of our Graduate School of Area and Culture Studies. To run the program, TUFS has accepted outstanding experts from all over the world—Europe, North and South America, Oceania, Asia, and Africa—who collaborate on education and research in a wide range of academic fields including linguistics, literature, history, philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics. Thus, we have attained an extremely consistent interdisciplinary and comprehensive approach for a single-faculty university. In an age that emphasizes the global community, it is certainly desirable for us to maximize and further develop this unique strength in both education and research. A strong foundation in foreign languages is vital to area and culture studies. TUFS engages in education and research in over 50 languages, cultures and societies in every part of the world, which contributes to cross-cultural understanding and the development of people capable of contributing to the actualization of a harmonious global community. In addition, a double-major system that requires students to specialize in both a language and a discipline-related course of study enables TUFS to produce graduates equipped with a high degree of language competence and a deep knowledge of world cultures and societies. Our new campus in Fuchu is proudly equipped with the state-of-the-art computing network. The most outstanding feature is the information literacy and the number of computers on campus, which ranks at the top level among

2

Setsuho IKEHATA

liberal arts universities in our country. With such priviledged information infrastructure, TUFS endeavors to make the best use of multimedia, the internet and other devices, in order to develop the most advanced language education. The University’s Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics project, selected by the 21st Century COE Program, is the concrete manifestation of our plans for the future, which I have just mentioned. The implementation team members are committed to this future vision and vigorously engaged in the project. It is my fervent desire that they will produce rewarding results. It is the intention of everyone at TUFS to combine our wisdom in a concerted effort to do our utmost to make a success of the 21st Century COE Program. With a view to providing full support to the program, TUFS has established the “21st Century COE Program Administration Office” which is directly responsible to myself, the President. This Office is an inter-sectional organization consisted of the President, the Vice-President, the deans of each division, the Program Leader, as well as the managers of the secretariat. Its important role is to enhance the cooperation between the various sections within TUFS and to administrate the use of the space and the budget allocated for research. Tokyo, December, 2005

Center of Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI) Yuji KAWAGUCHI (COE Program Leader, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) 1. Linguistic Informatics It is widely believed that linguistic theories and computer sciences have greatly influenced foreign language education, however the collaboration of these three domains has not brought about new scientific results. The present program aims to meet such a scientific need. An overall integration of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics will be realized on the basis of Computer Sciences. We have named this synthetic field Linguistic Informatics. When we hear this name for the first time, we may take it for a branch of natural sciences. However, since our language represents a system of information, linguistics itself constitutes, in a broad sense, a part of informatics. In the following lines, due to the limitation of space, I will explain only the essence of this 21st Century COE (Center of Excellence) Program. COE Program Promoters Yuji KAWAGUCHI Susumu ZAIMA Nobuo TOMIMORI Toshihiro TAKAGAKI Yoichiro TSURUGA Ikuo KAMEYAMA Akira MIZUBAYASHI Hideki NOMA Kohji SHIBANO Makoto MINEGISHI Mayumi USAMI

French and Turkish Linguistics German Linguistics Romance Linguistics Spanish Linguistics French Linguistics Russian Literature French Literature, History Korean Linguistics Information Technology Theoretical Linguistics Social Psychology of Language

2. Organization and Research Projects The present COE program is directed by the following supervisors: Susumu ZAIMA, Toshihiro TAKAGAKI, Yoichiro TSURUGA, Kohji SHIBANO, Makoto MINEGISHI, Mayumi USAMI and Yuji KAWAGUCHI. In 2004-2005, the following research projects are undertaken in three scientific fields respectively.

4

Yuji KAWAGUCHI

Research Projects in 2004-2005 LINGUISTICS: Corpus-based analysis of sentence structures and cross-linguistic perspectives in phonetics Yoichiro TSURUGA Yuji KAWAGUCHI Naotoshi KUROSAWA Kiyoko SOHMIYA Kazuyuki URATA Susumu ZAIMA, Takashi NARITA Toshihiro TAKAGAKI Hidehiko NAKAZAWA Takayuki MIYAKE Keiko MOCHIZUKI Shinjiro KAZAMA Isamu SHOHO Satoko YOSHIE Shinji YAMAMOTO Yuji KAWAGUCHI, Tsunekazu MORIGUCHI, Nobuo TOMIMORI, Hiroko SAITO, Masashi FURIHATA, Yoshio SAITO

Impersonal constructions in French Diachronic research on negative constructions in French Word order of modifier and modified constituent in Latin and Portuguese Aspects of marked constructions as seen in corpora Diachronic research on the subjunctive in English Corpus-based research on verb construction in German Construction of a Spanish corpus and the development of relevant tools to advance Spanish language research Utilization of a corpus for research on Russian verbs Research on the syntactic characteristics of Chinese verbs based on corpus analysis Comparative study of compound verbs in Japanese and Chinese that express “causal phenomena” and “resultant phenomena” and their corresponding English sentence structures Descriptive study of grammar using spoken and literary corpora The causes and results of marked word order in the Malaysian language Construction of a Wakhi vocabulary corpus The Italian language in the 21st century Prosodic analysis of speech through the TUFS Dialogue Module

APPLIED LINGUISTICS： Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, Evaluation of TUFS Language Modules

Mayumi USAMI

Tae UMINO

Construction and analysis of a multilingual corpus of spoken language Basic research on methodology for natural conversation analysis Development of a basic transcription system for Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English. Construction and analysis of Japanese learner-language corpus Basic research aimed at the development of learner’s manual for ‘Japanese Dialogue Module’


Asako YOSHITOMI Masashi NEGISHI, Hideyuki TAKASHIMA, Masanori ICHIKAWA, Koyo YAMAMORI

5

Construction of an English learner language corpus Revision of the English Dialogue Module teacher's manual Development of a Language Proficiency Scale Assessment of TUFS Language Modules

COMPUTER SCIENCES: E-learning, Natural Language Processing Hiroshi SANO Chun Chen LIN

Construction of an educational material corpus for Japanese language education Construction of e-learning system

In principle, these projects are considered as fundamental research for the development of TUFS Language Modules, which are the very fruits of Linguistic Informatics and the significant scientific contribution of this COE. 3. TUFS Language Modules 3.1. Cohabitation of Natural Language and Machine Language Our main objective is to innovate foreign language education by developing superior educational materials and delivering them over the Internet. At present, the following 17 languages are covered in the TUFS Language Modules. Editors of Pronunciation, Dialogue and Grammar Modules Cross-Linguistic Makoto MINEGISHI Grammar Keizo NOMURA, Hiroko SAITO, Kazuyuki URATA, English Asako YOSHITOMI German Takashi NARITA, Akiko MASAKI French Yuji KAWAGUCHI, Akira MIZUBAYASHI Spanish Shigenobu KAWAKAMI, Toshihiro TAKAGAKI Portuguese Naotoshi KUROSAWA, Chika TAKEDA Russian Hidehiko NAKAZAWA Chinese Kazuyuki HIRAI, Takayuki MIYAKE Korean Eui-sung CHO, Koichi IKARASHI, Hideki NOMA Mongolian Yoshio SAITO, Renzo NUKUSHINA, Hideyuki OKADA Indonesian Masashi FURIHATA Filipino Tsunekazu MORIGUCHI, Michiko YAMASHITA Lao Reiko SUZUKI Cambodian Hiromi UEDA, Tomoko OKADA Vietnamese Yoshio UNE, Hiroki TAHARA Arabic Robert RATCLIFFE Turkish Mutsumi SUGAHARA Japanese Futoshi KAWAMURA, Yumiko SATO, Tae UMINO

6

Yuji KAWAGUCHI

This is a large-scale project that includes more than 100 researchers and graduate students. In the TUFS Language Modules, the multilingual language learning system is one of the main features. In fact, we teach more than 40 different languages at TUFS. But the novelty of the TUFS Language Modules lies in another fact. For example, 17 languages are described in unicode (UTF-8), and in our system, HTML, a basic language of the World Wide Web (WWW), is correlated with XML, which was first invented in 1998 and has recently begun to be applied on the WWW. This project also has educational ends for graduate students, who undertake the role of preparing the primary materials for the structuring of the modules. Through this research activity, they will gain the knowledge not only of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, but also of Computer Sciences. In this way, the graduate program will foster new types of linguistic researchers – those who have full knowledge of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and who can manipulate a computer-assisted language learning system. 3.2. Modularized View of Language With the advent of the Internet, we have become conscious of the omnipresence of information, that is, what we call ubiquity of information. On the other hand, the WWW gives us an oppurtunity to re-think over how and what that information should be. On the WWW, theoretically speaking, infinite ordering and a combination of information are possible through their mutual linkages. In the TUFS Language Modules, we set our way of thinking free from a traditional view of language and adopt a modularized view of language. Each language unit is composed of four relatively independent modules, namely, pronunciation, dialogue, grammar and vocabulary modules. The idea of module components allows learners and teachers to learn and teach the target language from whichever part of the modules and in whatever order. 3.3. Cross-Linguistic Syllabus These modules will promise more freedom than ever to learners and teachers; however, a common measure is indispensable for the evaluation of language learning and education. In this sense, the evaluation of modules is very important for this COE program. As each module is designed independently, one may evaluate it individually. But as far as educational contents and goals are concerned, a more or less loose unity has been realized by adopting a common syllabus design for 17 different languages, so that in addition to a traditional analysis of learners’ idiosyncratic characters, one can make an interesting contrastive analysis of individual or universal


7

characteristics of second language acquisition (SLA) through 17 different languages. Therefore, the Cross-linguistic syllabus is regarded as an innovation in this web-based language education system. 3.4. Linguistic Usage The process of developing the TUFS Language Modules is as follows: 1. Creation of language materials; 2. Implementation on the WWW; and 3. Web-based language education. The first step is to create language materials which are appropriate for the language modules. We must ask ourselves about the kind of language materials that should be provided. Our conclusion is that these language materials should be “usage-based”. The key concept here is linguistic usage. Next, we must consider what exactly does the term usage mean. The term is highly polysemous. Some researchers claim that linguistic usage becomes explicit only through quantitative analysis of an enormous corpus. Others argue that usage should be fixed on mutual speech acts between a speaker and a listener. Moreover, some may suppose that linguistic usage is related to our cognition, for our linguistic knowledge will be accumulated through the encounter with new linguistic usages. We also find researchers who inisist on the interaction between linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects of linguistic usage. In short, the definition of usage is not at all unanimous among linguists. The TUFS Language Modules provide us with an opportunity to reconsider the significance of usage for linguistic research and language education. The pronunciation and dialogue modules became available on the Internet at the beginning of 2004. At the end of Academic Year 2005, the grammar module also became available for 10 different languages. The development of vocabulary module is underway. 4. First International Conference on Linguistic Informatics Immediately after the selection of this COE program by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, we undertook the preparation of the first conference on Linguistic Informatics. At the end of 2002, the outline was fixed. On December 13 and 14, the first International Conference on Linguistic Informatics was scheduled at TUFS. The conference consisted of three sessions: 1. Computer-Assisted Linguistics; 2. Corpus Linguistics; and 3. Applied Linguistics. It was a great honour for me to organize this international conference, which was pariticpated by many guest speakers not only from other universities in Japan but also from all over the world. Many graduate students, mostly PhD candidates, also presented their papers in the conference. Unlike most conferences, proceedings were published before

8

Yuji KAWAGUCHI

the conference since the conference covered large scientific fields, ranging from Computer Linguistics, Philology, Dialectology, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics to e-learning, and without the prepublished proceedings, the conference participants would not have been able to understand the essence of the contributions or to follow the discussions. Through this conference, we hope to have explained the concept of Linguistic Informatics, state of the art field, and presented the challenges this field must solve in the future. We hope that this synthesis of different scientific fields produces fruitful outcomes and help us to gain insights into the futurevision of this science. cf. TUFS Language Modules (Japanese version) : http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/modules/ TUFS Language Modules (Multilingual version) : http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/modules/ Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics: http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/ (in Japanese) http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/index.html (in English) In the spring of 2005, the John Benjamins Publishing Company of the Netherlands published a series of reports from The First International Conference on Linguistic Informatics as well as the results of corpus linguistic research as the first and second volumes of the series, Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics.


9

5. Second International Conference on Linguistic Informatics and Workshop on Spoken Language Corpora On December 9, 2005, a joint workshop entitled Spoken Language Corpus - Significance and Its Application - by C-ORAL-ROM and Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI) was held at TUFS. C-ORAL-ROM is a joint project on the spoken language corpora of Romance languages collaboratively compiled by the University of Florence in Italy, the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, the University of Aix-Marseille I in France, and the University of Lisbon in Portugal. On December 10, the following day, The Second International Conference on Linguistic Informatics—Contributions of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, and Computer Science, was held at the TUFS Multimedia Hall. The rationale for linguistic informatics was identified and the academic position of this field was discussed in various lectures on linguistic analysis of spoken language, pragmatic analysis, second-language acquisition, and corpus linguistics.

Preface Yuji KAWAGUCHI This collection of papers is the product of the Cross-Linguistic Phonetic Research of the Center of Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI), the 21st Century COE Program of the Graduate School of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). In October of 2004, the Cross-Linguistic Phonetic Research Group published in Japanese Cross-Linguistic Perspectives in Phonetics—Phonetic Description and Prosodic Analysis—, Working Papers in Linguistic Informatics 4. The first part of this report collection, “Phonetic Description,” provides detailed descriptions of usage regions, norm and dialects, orthography and pronunciation, phonological systems, accent and intonation, and phonetic variation in 11 languages. In the second part, “Prosodic Analysis,” three young researchers reported on case studies in Russian, French, and Korean based on the research theme for Year 2003, Cross-Linguistic Research on Syntactic Structures and Prosodic Features. As explained in the preceding section, the Center of UBLI is currently developing internet language materials called TUFS Language Modules. In 2004, conversational materials (hereafter called the dialogue module) for 17 languages were completed. At that time, the Cross-Linguistic Phonetic Research Group also began phonetic research using the dialogue module. As before, their research theme was “Cross-Linguistic Research on syntactic structures and prosodic features,” but in order to transcend the differences among languages and establish a common framework for the entire project, they decided to use the dialogue module as their language corpus. At present, “Intonation in interrogative sentences” is set as the common theme of a concurrent research project and phonetic analysis of multiple languages is being conducted. Several contributions have been made in this text on this theme as well. The outcomes of this research project are expected to be compiled into a report in Japanese next year. The text “Prosody and Syntax – Cross-Linguistic Perspectives” was planned by Yuji Kawaguchi and Tsunekazu Moriguchi, central members of the Cross-Linguistic Phonetic Research Group. Professor Ivan Fónagy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences expressed his interest in the project from the beginning. In December 2004, Kawaguchi published an appeal to foreign researchers successfully seeking support for the text, and planning began for

12

Yuji KAWAGUCHI

the publication of the text. The term “Prosody” in the main title of the text needs to be explained further. “Prosody,” as it is used here, does not refer to metrics, which analyzes vowel length in prose.1 According to traditional Prague phonology, prosody refers to the phonological description of word and syllabic structures as well as consonant and vowel hiatus. On the other hand, in Trubetzkoy’s Principles of Phonology, issues on the syllabic nucleus, syllable, and mora are discussed under “Prosodic Properties.” In addition, Trubetzkoy states that prosodic units are differentiated by intensity in syllable-timed language, and by pitch in mora-timed language.2 Furthermore, Trubetzkoy comments on accent arrangement in the section, “Prosodic Differentiation Properties,” and on sentence intonation and accent in “Prosodic Oppositions Differentiating Sentences.” 3 Thus, according to Trubetzkoy, “Prosodic properties do not belong to the vowels as such, but to the syllables,” 4 and are therefore phonetic phenomena appearing in units larger than segments, that is, they are “suprasegmental.” In American linguistics these are often called “suprasegmental phonemes.” It is often said that word accent and tone also have differential functions. However, strictly speaking, the function of these suprasegmental properties within the speech chain is not differential, but rather contrasting or demarcative. On the other hand, the melody curve of sentences that express basic linguistic acts, such as the constative, interrogative, and directive, is ocassionally said to have a syntactic, pragmatic function.5 In conclusion, “prosody,” as used in this text, appears in units larger than segments and generally refers to the field that studies various phonological properties connected to utterances involving pitch, intensity, and length. These phonetic features almost always appear within complex combinations such as word and sentence accents and intonation.6 Next, a synopsis of each paper will be given in the order appearing in the text. In “Functions of Intonation,” Ivan Fónagy and Eva Bérard examine in 1 2 3 4 5 6

Georges Mounin, Dictionnaire de la linguistique (1974) PUF, 274. N.S. Troubetzkoy, Principes de phonologie (1976) trad. par J. Cantineau, Editions Klincksieck, 213. Troubetzkoy, op.cit., 238-244. Troubetzkoy, op.cit., 196. Pierre Delattre takes this position in the case of French language. “Prosodic features may extend over varying domains: sometimes over relatively short stretches of utterances, like one syllable or one morpheme or one word (...); sometimes over relatively longer stretches of utterances, like one phrase, or one clause, or one sentence. Of course this distinction is not always as clear-cut as it first appears: a sentence, for example, may consist of one word.”, Alan Cruttenden, Intonation, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.1.

Preface

13

detail the various linguistic and extralinguistic functions of intonations. The diversity of intonational functions alone is impressive: Function of actualization, function of demarcation, function of linking, culminative function, expressive function, predictive function, function of appeal, distinctive function, modal function, function of identification and aesthetic function. According to Fónagy and Bérard, development of various verbal genres depends on how deeply each of these functions relates to the utterances. In speech, the demarcative function is significant, but this disappears in impassioned speech. Fónagy and Bérard argue that various evolutive states of intonational function are actively reproduced in speech acts, and stress the importance of such evolutive approaches even in linguistic research. Fónagy’s unique view of language is revealed in the expression, “the successive stages of intonation’s functional history.” In “Prosodic Constituents in French —A Data-Driven Approach—,” Jacqueline Vaissière and Alexis Michaud aim to (i) summarise essential facts about the syntactic prosody of French as seen within the broader picture of French prosody, and (ii) provide a cross-linguistic perspective, by bringing out characteristics which sharply distinguish French from English, and drawing their implications for the difficult issue of cross-linguistic prosodic description, which arguably holds the key to substantial progress in our understanding of prosody. The essentials of a superpositional model of intonation for French are briefly set out. In “A Predictive Approach to the Analysis of Intonation in Discourse in French,” Piet Mertens presents an approach to the analysis of prosody in discourse in French, based on a prediction of the unmarked default intonation matching the lexical and syntactic properties of the analyzed utterances. By confronting this default intonation with the actual intonation used by the speaker, one identifies the marked intonation elements. The prediction of default intonation takes into account word stress, syllable count, syntactic dependency relations, and syntactic construction. In the process, criteria are proposed for the definition of discourse units based on both formal syntactic and prosodic criteria. Manfred Markus, in “English and German Prosody —A Contrastive Comparison—,” begins by clearly stating that prosody, as defined in this text, is an important feature of the British southern standard, and then examines prosodic parameters in English and German from the point of view of comparative linguistics. In line with Kaltenbacher (1997) he explains English word stress to be primarily based on intensity and syllable length, whereas German word stress is more based on pitch. Next, Markus discusses the differences between the two languages in view of the various prosodic parameters, including pitch, and in view of syllable reduction. While German

14

Yuji KAWAGUCHI

is identified as a syllable-timed language, the English language system has tendencies towards stress timing. There are also differences in the stress patterns within rhythmic groups, with German relying on both syllable length and intensity, and English on pitch. After providing a survey of these prosodic parameters, Markus compares and contrasts the prosodic structures of the two languages in a theme and rheme framework, and in constative, interrogative, and directive sentences. Hiroko Saito’s “Nuclear-Stress Placement by Japanese Learners of English —Transfer from Japanese—” presents practical research filled with educational suggestions. This is because her motivation for the research stems from the relevence of English questions given by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations that ask to locate the intonational nuclei. This paper examines the cause of emphatic enunciation of function words, particularly auxiliary verbs, by Japanese learners. As a result, she discovers that there is a tendency among Japanese people to emphatically enunciate in English what is accented (i.e., has a high pitch) in Japanese. In other words, it is thought that Japanese people change Japanese into English and transfer prosodic properties of the parts of speech of Japanese into English. In “Mismatch of Stress and Accent in Spoken Spanish,” Takuya Kimura points out that in spoken Spanish, places of the lexical stress and those of the pitch accent do not coincide in many cases: there are accents without stresses, and stresses without accents. It is difficult to properly treat these phenomena within the current Sp-ToBI framework, represented by Beckman et al. (2002) and Sosa (2003) among others, and it would be necessary to solve this problem, either admitting to assign a starred tone to an unstressed syllable or admitting the existence of tritonal accents like HLH*. Furthermore, despite the fact that many of the Sp-ToBI investigators deny the existence of the pitch accent H*+L in Spanish, Kimura finds that it indeed exists. In “Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb —How Morphology and Phonology Interact—,” which deals with the morphology of the Portuguese verb, Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho argues, much in the line of the old structuralist postulate of ‘separation of levels’, that phonologically-based constraints are independent from morphologically-based ones, and that both types of constraints interact in such a way that phonology is actually exploited by morphology. As a result, all inflected forms of the verb can be ranked within a markedness scale according to violation of either constraint. This clashes with both SPE- and OT-based views. On the one hand, phonology cannot be said to be a mere interpretative component of grammar. On the other hand, morphological and phonological constraints cannot be

Preface

15

said to play symmetrical parts either. While phonology is blind with respect to morphology, the latter is fully sensitive to phonological primes, structures and markedness, and this is the reason why it can use them for its own purposes. In “Intonational Patterns in Russian Interrogatives —Phonetic Analyses and Phonological Interpretations—,” Yosuke Igarashi criticizes existing research on intonation patterns in interrogatives (WH questions and yes-no questions) in Russian, and points out that the fundamental frequency curves (F0) of the two are quite similar. Igarashi also shows that the phonetic differences between the two patterns are found in (1) the temporal position of the peak frequency with respect to stressed syllables, (2) the height of the F0 peak, and (3) the existence of low inflection point near the onset of a stressed syllable. Finally, based on the results of his experiments, Igarashi presents phonological interpretations of two intonation patterns. In Fumio Inoue’s “Sociolinguistic Characteristics of Intonation,” intonation is dealt with from a sociolinguistics viewpoint on the basis of the phenomena called “rise-fall intonation” (or bottom-up intonation, uptalk) and other related intonations. Social or sociopsychological characteristics of users of “rise-fall intonation” and the function of the intonation within discourse are examined. Furthermore, the “rise-fall intonation” is regarded as an example of on-going linguistic changes, and a universal issue of whether or not there are intermediate stages in the course of linguistic changes is studied. Lastly, the viewpoint presented in Inoue’s paper is extended to include examples of intonations in other languages. Hirokazu Sato’s “Interaction between Phonetic Features and Accent-Placement in Japanese Family Names” examines the pronunciation and accent position of names containing the Chinese character (kanji) ta (Shibata, Takada, etc.). Generally, the sound of the preceding syllable decides the pronunciation of the character as -ta or -da, but Sato also points out other influences thought to result from the word-initial consonant. When pronounced as -ta, the accent is generally said to be at the front of the name, and when pronounced as -da, it is said that there is no accent. However, according to Sato’s analysis, not only the reading of -ta, but also the sound alignment and movement of the entire articulatory organ are related factors. In “The Intonation of Interrogative Utterances in the Japanese Dialogs —Analysis of the “TUFS Language Module”—,” Mieko Takada and Takako Ayusawa analyze the acoustic characteristics of the interrogative utterances used in “the Japanese Dialog Module”, with respect to the utterance-final intonation types and the amount of rise, in relation to the functions, the utterance-final forms, the speakers and the position of accent within a word. The utterance-final intonation types were classified into 3 types: rising,

16

Yuji KAWAGUCHI

falling and rising-falling intonations. Rising intonation is observed most frequently and falling and rising-falling intonations are observed with specific utterance-final forms. The amount of rise varies depending on the speaker and the position of accent in a word. It is also found that when the final mora is high, the amount of rise tends to be small, and when the penultimate mora is accented, the amount of rise tends to be large. Though based on limited materials, the results of the analysis reveals some of the interesting features of the acoustic characteristics of the Japanese interrogative intonation. Akira Utsugi and Hideki Noma, in “The Prosody of Auxiliaries in Seoul Korean,” study the prosody in auxiliaries in the Seoul dialect of Korean, with particular attention on the formation of accentual phrase (AP). They examine whether a main predicate and an auxiliary appear as one or two APs. Analyzing “the Korean Dialogue Module” as data, they find that the combination of main and auxiliary declinable words can result in 1AP or 2AP. As a result of further analysis, they discover the tendency for AP formation to differ according to the number of syllables in the main predicate, and for negative auxiliaries to always appear as 2AP. In “On the Nature of Rules Sensitive to Syntax – The Case of Makonde Tonology–,” Cédric Patin and Annie Rialland analyze four dialects of Makonde and argue in favor of an analogical origin of some tone rules which are usually considered as phonology-syntax rules. They propose that these tone rules in Makonde dialects are not phonological rules which occur in specific syntactic environments, and should in fact be treated in morphology and not as part of phonology-syntax interface. The paper presents how analogy could be used as a criterion in order to differentiate between rules in which phonology intervenes and morphological processes. The general issue concerns the nature of phonology-syntax interface as well as which rules are related and which are not related to this interface. Masashi Furihata, in “An Acoustic Study on Intonation of Nominal Sentences in Indonesian,” uses “the Indonesian Dialogue Module” as data, along with phonetic analysis software to extract the pitch from 34 nominal sentences in 514 utterances, and anaylzes them according to Halim’s (1981) theory of Indonesian. According to Furihata’s analysis, the subject pitch pattern in subject-predicate sentences generally correspond to Halim’s theory, but there are also findings that seem to depart from the theory, particularly in predicates with interrogatives. In predicate-subject sentences, no consistent pattern for pitch curves in declarative sentences is found. Despite the limited number of sentences analyzed, this study provides interesting results regarding intonation in Indonesian nominal sentences. In “Acoustic and Structural Analysis of Enclitic Particles in Tagalog,”

Preface

17

Tsunekazu Moriguchi examines the enclitics or enclitic particles in Tagalog from the acoustic point of view with reference to structure, and concludes that the clitic order observed in Tagalog and other aboriginal languages in the Philippines and Taiwan is defined by the structural and/or acoustic bases, which are both observed in the Tagalog language. However, the Tagalog clitic order is mainly determined by the latter. In “Intonation Patterns of Turkish Interrogatives,” Yuji Kawaguchi, Selim Yılmaz, and Arsun Uras Yılmaz note that there are almost no studies of intonation in Turkish based on natural conversation. In this paper, “the Turkish Dialogue Module” is regarded as partially natural conversation, and the interrogative sentences appearing therein are analyzed. The authors argue that there are two related prosodic positions in both WH questions and yes/no questions. In particular, they present a hypothesis that since utterance-final fundamental frequency curves are closely related to the pragmatic meaning of the entire interrogative sentence, by connecting the pragmatic meaning to the three basic speech acts (interrogative, assertive, and directive), each interrogative sentence brings a diverse possibility of interpretations. Having surveyed the topic of each paper, the subtitle of this text, Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, does not imply mere, cross-linguistic comparison and contrast of the prosodic phenomena. Rather, it implies that there are a variety of approaches which are unique to each language for prosodic analysis. In the end, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon Professor Ivan Fónagy (1920-2005) who was one of the featured authors of this volume and our great teacher. I received the news of Professor Fónagy’s passing from his daughter, Eva, on April 13, 2005. Professor Fónagy, who dedicated his life to the study of intonation and language change, not only expressed his interest in the idea of this project early on, but also kindly agreed to contribute a paper, and presented his final manuscript “Functions of Intonation” in December of 2004.7 No one ever imagined that this paper would be his posthumous work. 8 Since the passing of his wife, Judith Fónagy, who was also a phonetician, Professor Fónagy lived in Antony, a suburb of Paris. It saddens me that I will no longer be able to converse and share memories with him. This text is dedicated to the memory of these commited Hungarian linguists. December 2005 7

8

This paper was emended and revised into a new paper from its original publication as “Des fonctions de l’intonation: Essai de synthèse” in Flambeau 29, 2002, p.1-20, the journal of the Section of French Studies at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His final work is Dynamique et changement, which will be published by Peeters Publishers.

Functions of Intonation Ivan FÓNAGY and Eva BÉRARD The authors of prosodic contributions typically assign three functions to intonation, rarely the same ones. The magic of number three seems to be effective even in the linguistic domain. The classical model of verbal communication advanced by Karl Bühler (1934) distinguishing three functions involved in verbal communication, expression (Ausdrucksfunktion), call (Appellfunktion) and representation (Representations-funktion), could lend a suitable frame-work to functional studies of intonation. Georges Faure (1962) maintains the three functions introduced by Bühler, presented in a different order: representative, appellative and expressive. Unlike Bühler, he assigns the expression of emotions to the appellative function. Milan Romportl (1973) distinguishes the demarcative (intonation +/- terminal), the modal (interrogative +/-) and the emotive functions. For Herbert Pilch (1972) intonation may play a morpho-syntactic role, it specifies the genre of discourse, and may reflect the speaker’s character traits or indicate his social milieu. Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux (1983) suggests the functions of integration, of segmentation and of signification. The salience of a syllable may be conceived in terms of culmination, of emphasis, of accentuation, focalization and of contrast. Differences are partly terminological. Mathesius (1937) considers the expression of emotion as a ‘secondary-modal function’ His ‘primary-modal function coincides with Artëmov’s (1969) predicative function. Lee’s (1960) recovers the emphatic function of other authors. The linking function, introduced by Kličnikova (1965) does not differ from the function of unification, cohesion and integration proposed by other authors (Karcevskij 1931, Hazaël-Massieux 1983). Faure’s appellative function covers the expression of emotions, generally attributed to the expressive function (Daneš 1960, Rigault 1964, Artëmov 1969, Martin 1973). 1. Function of enunciation and actualization Intonation plays a primary role in presenting the information content of the message in the form of a live (viva voce) speech act which creates immediate links between speaker and hearer(s). It situates the message in a concrete context and gives expression to its actual, individual significance (Karcevskij 1931). According to Michel Martins-Baltar (1977) the function

20

Ivan FÓNAGY and Eva BÉRARD

of intonation does not only consist in the actualization of a text-segment and of its syntactic structure. Its essential contribution consists in the enunciation of the text, in lending to its literal meaning a special significance (sens) in relation with the context and the present situation. Through enunciation the text is transformed in a live – illocutive, allocutive and perlocutive - speech act (oc. 20-27). 2. Function of segmentation and demarcation A.H. Gleason (1965: 179) considers the segmentation of sound-sequences into morphemes and the demarcation of discursive units as a primary function of intonation. P.M. Hargrove and N.S.McGarr (1994) devote a thorough-going study to the prosodic organization of discourse. Structuring of discourse constitutes the first function of intonation for František Daneš (1960: 14), followed by the indication of modality, as a second function. Dieter Wunderlich (1988, in: H.Altmann ed.1988) makes the same binary distinction. Intonation outlines the basic units of discourse, and reveals the statement’s informational structure (Perrot 1978), in dividing the utterance in two parts: topic and comment (thème et propos, Bally 1944: 61-109; Martins-Baltar 1977: 20). Dislocation or projection of topic or comment, or another part of the phrase, is a special, language dependent way of demarcation, which became frequent in French everyday speech during the first half of the nineteenth century (Bally 1941, Deulofeu 1984, Sabio 1991, Blasco 1995). Left projection brings into the limelight one element of the discourse. Knud Lambrecht (1987) labels left projection, topic, and right projection anti-topic. Left and right projections lend, at the same time, a segmented aspect to the speech process (Martins-Baltar 1977: 19-25). 3. Presentational function Anticipation, labeled Devise by the German musicologist H.Riemann, is a current form of introduction of a musical theme. Left projected phrase fragments might play a similar role in discourse. This is equally true for the category of presentational constructions introduced by Knud Lambrecht (1987), such as “Y’a mon frère qui vient en trois semaines [It’s my brother who will come in three weeks]. The function of the introductory phrase, pronounced on a level tone, is to present, to introduce a person. 4. Function of linking Linking is a complementary function of segmentation, another facet (the positive side) of demarcation. The link may be explicitly marked at the morpho-syntactic level. In French, in careful speech or in reading, the last virtual consonant of the preceding word may become physically present in

Functions of Intonation

21

joining the initial vowel of the next word: liaison (Martinon 1913: 57 ff.). Syntactic units are generally marked by a global melodic movement, followed by a virtual pause: a juncture. A floating final tone indicates that the syntactic unit is linked to a subsequent one, and that both are only parts of the utterance. The utterance final pitch pattern may then again indicate that the utterance is embedded in a larger discourse unit, labeled “rhetoric syntagm” (von Essen 1956: 29) or “macro-syntactic unit” (Blanche-Benveniste 1975, 1990; Deulofeu 1977; Berrendonner 1990). There are other means to suggest that the statement is part of a larger unit: the absence of the terminal pause, a melodic arch bending subsequent utterances, sometimes of contrasting modes. A rising – falling melodic pattern, a “melodic cliché” (Fónagy, I., Bérard, Eva and Fónagy, Judith 1983) fuses French ↗ Mais non! (By no means!) ↘ Pourquoi? (Why?); occasionally other statements are followed by an interrogation, such as ↗ C’est inquiétant (It is alarming) ↘ Où peut-il être? (Where might he be?) The melodic pattern of enumeration may grow out of the utterance, suggesting a larger discourse unit, with an extension of the concept of enumeration, reflecting lack of interest and a bored attitude (see: distinctive function). Sentences may be connected by means of melodic rhymes: specific intonation patterns, mostly melodic clichés, occurring in the last syllables of subsequent utterances (I. and Judith Fónagy 1983: 173). Anne Catherine Simon (2004) refers to cases of dual analysis of the same sentence: intonation may offer its own interpretation of the articulation of the sentence which departs from its syntactic structures. According to musical terminology: the two ways of articulation are contrapuntal. This may account for the surprising result of a punctuation test. Two groups of French informants were invited to write punctuation signs (. , : ! ? : …) in a current text without punctuation. Group A had to resolve the task on the basis of the sole text. Group B could listen at the same time to the original recording. Group A, the ‘readers’ performed much better than Group B, ‘readers and hearers’. There were significantly less contradictions between the proposed solutions by the members of Group A, than between those of Group B, distracted by the contradictions between syntactic and prosodic demarcation (I. and J.Fónagy 1983). 5. Culminative function: emphasis Emphasis consists in the speaker’s highlighting (“underlining”) a part of the message. The attention of the hearer is focalized on the element enhanced essentially by prosodic means: lengthening, intensity, raising. The

22


segmentation of the speech-product itself (by pause, juncture and parenthesis) allows for enhancing one or more segments (Martins-Baltar 1977: 20). Emphasis is generally contrastive and implies an unspoken comment (see: allusive function). Pronounced without emphasis, the French utterance C’est pas le jour qui me convient means ‘That’s not a convenient day for me’. If contrastive emphasis is lent to the word jour the utterance means that it’s not the day that matters, there are still other, more relevant, problems - hinted at but left unmentioned by the speaker. In the English utterances quoted by Anthony Hind (1978) the distinctive emphasis is accompanied by a fall-rise tone. Without emphasis I wouldn’t speak to any doctor means that the speaker prefers not to consult a doctor. The emphatic fall-rise tone lent to any implies a negative evaluation: ‘I wouldn’t speak to a common doctor, run of the mill’. Tonal emphasis, a final high rise, may lend a special emotive meaning to the sentence. Il m’a passé un de ses sa- ↗ vons (‘He gave me one of his soaps’) suggests ‘He gave me a tongue-lashing’. In Hungarian, as in many other languages, neutral utterance generally contrasts with the two marked realizations by either focusing on the subject, Kati futott (‘It was Kati who was running’), or on the predicate: Kati futott (see: allusive function; Fónagy 1989, in: Hirst and Di Cristo 328-343). In all these cases, emphasis plays a distinctive role. Beyond the sentence, in the macro-syntactic domain (Deulofeu 1977, Blanche-Benveniste 1990), essential parts of the message may be focalised through higher pitch level or through raising pitch, lengthening of vowels and consonants, slowing down the pace; other parts relegated into the background by opposite procedures: low intensity, mid pitch level, monotony, medium pace. Lack of emphasis, low intensity level, monotony characterize parenthetical pragmatic remarks in face of main phrases. “Mary knows many languages, you know” vs. “Mary knows many languages you know” ‘Mary and you have similar backgrounds and have both learned many languages’ (P.J.Price et al 1991: 2967). Lack of emphasis functions in that case as a distinctive prosodic marker (see below). 6. Expressive function I: Expression of emotions The term ex-pression contains the core of the theory of expressive functions. The “ex-pression”, the projection of the disturbing factors, creates a relieve. Due to its dynamic character, speech melody is particularly suited for the expressive role. We perceive intonation as a movement. In the Timaeus 988C-E) Plato connects external and internal movement. “The movement of the body…has rhythm, a feature shared with the movement of


23

the voice”, he says (Laws II, 672e). “We would speak of rise and fall, of height and depth” wrote Aristoxenos (fourth century B.C.) in his Harmonics, and he adds: “the rise is a continuous movement of the voice from a deeper to a higher level, and the fall is a movement of a higher to a deeper one” (ed. Marquard 1868: 15). A dynamic theory of intonation is implicitly contained in the Hungarian term hanglejtés, lit. ‘vocal dance’. We must distinguish carefully between direct laryngeal gesturing at the glottal level – changes of the glottal configuration, tension and relaxation of intrinsic laryngeal muscles, emphatic glottal closure, etc. - , that is between primary vocal symbols, at the one hand, and indirect or projective tonal gesturing, by means of virtual spatial pitch movements, on the other; a second degree of symbolization. Anger, as manifested in violent quarrel, is characterized at the primary symbolic level by tension of the intrinsic glottal muscles and laryngeal constriction, which contrast with the relaxation of intrinsic laryngeal muscles and a more relaxed laryngeal configuration in tender speech. – At the second symbolic level, that of virtual pitch movements, violent quarrel induces a rigid melodic base line with sudden rises, corresponding to the interval of a fourth, fifth or sixth. - Tenderness, on the contrary, is reflected by legato phrasing because of the weak participation of the expiratory muscles, and an undulating melodic line at mid low pitch level, with gradual, smooth transitions. Charles Darwin (1872) and Herbert Spencer (1872) are responsible for the extension of the causal principle into the domain of basic emotions, which become meaningful and appropriate once they are placed back in their natural, original context. Symptoms of emotive behaviour are considered to be vestiges of a once purposive activity. Fear and anger are traced back to the ancestral activities of fight and flight. As formulated by G.W.Crile: Anger is a philogenetic product of fight; fear reproduces flight (1915: 76). 7. Expressive function II: Expression of attitudes. Social attitudes can be equally traced back to corporal actions. – Complaint: a stylized reproduction of the vocalization of a crying child. The changes of pitch level are induced in crying, as well as in complaint, by corresponding changes of subglottal pressure due to the contractions of the diaphragm at rhythmic intervals. We meet with this para-linguistic pattern even in the language of music. Rhythm and pitch movements of an 8 years old Hungarian girl: ↗ Pé-ter ↗ min-dig ↗ ha-zudik, ↗ úgy ↗ hazudik mint egy ↗ gép [Peter is always lying, he lies just as a machine] reappear in the lamento chorus of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (Fónagy 1981). Longing: the prosodic pattern of longing in our Hungarian, French,

24


German and English recordings regularly starts with an off-beat of two or more syllables. A slow, slight rise in pitch and intensity is followed by a gradual fall in both parameters. While the intensity decreases until the end of the utterance, the melody ends with a gentle rise. The speed is slow and the phrasing legato. A corresponding synthesized version of this pattern proved to be the most appropriate in suggesting longing. The biological model could be a deep sigh combined with tension and a striving towards an invisible aim. The phrasing is legato in musical language. We meat the theme of longing in Orfeo’s “Al mio languire…” (Monteverdi: Orfeo, act 5), in the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, in Melisande’s sigh in the second act of Pelléas et Mélisande of Claude Debussy (Fónagy and Magdics 1963, Magdics 1963, Fónagy 1981). Irony: The complexity and dramatic character of emotive vocal performance is still more conspicuous in the case of irony. The concept of irony comprises a wide and highly diversified set of attitudes (Muecke 1969). The types of vocal performance to be considered here correspond to an overt and somewhat simplified expression of irony. According to prosodic and cineradiological analysis (Fónagy, Hand and Simon 1983) and semantic tests of synthesized variants (Fónagy 1971), irony can be conceived in a first approach as a parodistic slowed down reproduction of a very resolute, self-conscious statement (see: imitative function). - Its vocal profile can be described in three distinct phases. (a) An initial phase in chest register, at a very low level, narrow pitch range, a creaky voice due strong laryngeal and pharyngeal constriction; (b) a second phase in head register with a sudden high rise; the tonal peak coincides with a depression of the intensity curve; (c) in a third phase pitch falls to the deepest level, phonation returns to the chest register and creaky voicing. At the level of primary symbolic pharyngeal and laryngeal constriction, “strangled voice”, contain a menace even if the speaker is throttling his own throat. Chest register, deep, growing, creaky voice call to mind a robust male or a beat of prey. The sudden change of vocal attitude in the second phase – high tone level, head register – seems to evoke the tender approach of a child or of a young woman. The persistence of laryngeal, pharyngeal and oral tension may, however, raise suspicion. The final return of the robust beast clearly shows that childish innocence or female seduction was but a lure. Constant high pitch level, excluding male aggression, lends itself for the vocal expression of politeness. Japanese women use a very high register of voice as a politeness formula (Isamu Abe in: Hirst and Di Cristo 1998: 373; Loveday 1981).


25

8. Predictive function Each verbal unite, both in conversation and reading, sets the stage for the subsequent one. Progressive co-articulation is a basic feature of verbal strategy. It is particularly conspicuous at the prosodic level. The increasing tension of the topic prepares the concluding comment (Grammont 1964). A restrictive statement is generally preceded by the intonation pattern of concessive propositions. The hearer can guess whether the following proposition is introduced by and or by but (Fónagy 1981). The role of prediction can be best shown, even measured, by presenting to the hearers truncated utterances, asking them to restablish the lacking part. In 15-18 cases out of 19, Hungarian subjects correctly guessed whether the presented utterance precedes a co-ordinate clause introduced by the conjunction and, or whether it is followed by an adversative clause, introduced by but. For the opposition of the subsequent causal vs. concessive clause we got 16 – 19 correct answers out of 19 (Fónagy and Magdics 1967: 152-181). Similarly, if a French phrase such as C’est un gentil garçon ends with a rising tune, we expect further details or a positive comment. If, however, the last syllable of garçon is slightly depressed, we are prepared to hear some restriction (such as: “but he is not eager to helps”). Tests of perception of truncated French utterances show that in the great majority of cases the hearers correctly guess the subsequent coordinate vs. adversative clause (Fónagy 1979, Grosjean 1983). (a) (b)

C’est un gentil garçon … [et il est le premier de la classe] (It’s a nice boy…. [and he is the first of the class] C’est un gentil garçon…[mais il n’aime pas faire les commissions] (It’s a nice boy…[but he doesn’t like commissions]

87 subjects out of 100 identified correctly the lacking clause in the frame of a forced choice test on the basis of prosodic divergences between phrase (a) and (b). In the first phrase (a) garçon was pronounced with a gradually rising tone; in the second (b) an initial rise was followed by a hook-like descent. We generally meet this tonal configuration in utterances reflecting a negative, restrictive, ambivalent or hesitant attitude (Fónagy 1979: 116). In certain cases, the predictive function may become distinctive. This happened in the case of regressive vowel nasalization in Ancient French. The nasalized vowel predicted a subsequent nasal consonant. After the fall of the subsequent nasal consonants, the vowels nasality became a distinctive feature opposing nasal and oral vowels. In a similar way, predictive speech melody may become distinctive in elliptical sentences, where the melodic movement compensates for the truncation of the utterance. Et alors ‘And

26


then’ spoken with a rising tune invite the partner to tell the end of the story. The same elliptic utterance, pronounced with a gradual descent (in quarters) may suggest “it is no concern of mine”, “I have nothing to do with it” (Martins-Baltar 1970, 1977). 9. Function of appeal In Karl Bühler’s classical model (1934), the function of appeal enhances the hearer’s role in the act of communication. In its primary meaning, appeal refers to a speech act which may take diverse forms according the context and the social relation of the participants. Dafydd Gibbon (1976) distinguishes hailing (shouting “hallo!”, “Yoo-hoo!”), calling (“John-nee!”), greeting (“By-by”), formulaic shouting (“dinner is served”), talking to babes-in-arms, transactions (“Please!”, “Thank you”). Roman Jakobson’s functional model (SW 3: 18-51) allows for the distinction of “conative” acts (vocative, imperative) and “phatic” acts (Malinowski’s term), serving to establish, to prolong or to discontinue communications, “to check whether the channel works”. Intonation plays an important role in the distinction of conative vs. phatic acts. Three basic terminals - fall, level, and rise – allows in Japanese to express social attitudes ranging from demanding to appealing, soft or insistent (Isamu Abe, in Hirst & Di Cristo 1998: 368). – Japanese hái hái (Yes) with a first hái forming a higher peak would imply a ‘willing’ yes, with the second hái forming a higher peak would imply a ‘reluctant’ yes (Isamu Abe oc. p.372). Appeal is the basic function of echo-questions, and of questions in general. Romanian Ce? (What?). Cum? (How?) Cînd? (When?), ask the partner to repeat the same word; they may express surprise, protest and indignation at the partner’s words (Dascălu-Jinga, in Hirst & Di Cristo 1998: 249; see also: imitative function). 10. Allusive function Speech melodies may be vaguely distinctive, referring to a subject without naming it professedly. This function which could be labeled allusive plays an eminent role in everyday conversations, since it allows for suggesting opinions without assuming responsibility, or for suggesting ideas before finding the proper terms to express them exactly at the level of conceptual thinking. Intonation is always allusive as far as the hearer is free to assign some meaning to melodic movements which depart from an ideal neutral pattern. We could, however, assign a more restricted meaning to allusive function, reserving it to some recurrent conventional patterns with a well


27

circumscribed conceptual domain, such as the stylized rising-falling ironic intonation pattern (Fónagy 1971), suggesting: “I don’t mean it really, in fact, I think rather the opposite”. Pierre Léon (1970: 68) postulates an implicative rising-falling pattern with a general ‘implicative’ meaning; its concrete content is different according to the context. Emphasis may be allusive, suggesting the hidden presence of second statement. This is the case in the elliptic “one legged sentences” referred to by Janet Mueller Bing (1985): “Bob didn’t solve some of the problems”, with a contrastive rise-fall emphasis suggesting that he solved, in fact, all the problems. Allusive emphasis conveys a malicious understatement: a specific ironic pitch-profile is lent to stressed syllable. Hungarian has a clear-cut, highly conventional pitch-pattern, marking allusive emphasis. Plain emphasis of the verb in Kati tudta ‘Kati knew [that]’ lends a special weight to the fact that Kati knew it. The emphasis of the subject, Kati tudta, means that ‘Kati was the one, who knew it’. In the case of allusive emphasis, a falling-rising tune of the depressed first syllable spoken with laryngeal and pharyngeal constriction, much like in irony, contains the malignant allusion to ‘certain other persons, and you know who are the persons meant, didn’t know anything’. Allusive emphasis plays a distinctive role in face of simple emphasis. 11. Imitative function Tonal movement may reproduce, re-present, both in the general and in the literal sense of the term, physical or mental movements. Our perception of speech melody is essentially dynamic. In the Timaeus (88c-e), Plato connects external and internal movements. “The movement of the body…has rhythm, a features shared with movement of the voice” he says (Laws II, 672e). Aristoxenus wrote, “We could speak of rise and fall, of height and depth,” in his Harmonics (ed. Marquard 1868: 15). A dynamist theory is implicitly contain in the Hungarian word for intonation: hanglejtés ‘vocal dance’. Imitation is an elementary, immediate form of representation, circumventing conceptual analysis, in contrast to morphemes and lexemes. “Tonal movement” observes Dwight Bolinger (1986: 212-214) “especially in artistic performances, spatial movement, upward and downward movements, in the physical or in the metaphorical dimension”. He unfolded the semantic potentials of the metaphor of Up and Down (1986: 202-204). Yves Montand’s chanson ‘La balançoire’ (See-saw) threw light on the prosodic features creating the illusions of a rocking movement (Bérard 1998).

28


12. Distinctive function According to Leonard Bloomfield, “in English and in the languages of Europe generally, pitch is the acoustic feature where gesture like variations, non-distinctive but socially effective, border most closely upon genuine linguistic distinctions” (1933: 114). Kenneth Pike refuses categorically to assign a grammatical function to intonation. “There is no grammatical basis to intonation” (1945: 10). “The suggestion that there is a purely grammatical function of intonation as opposed to attitudinal one is theoretically unsound”, declares David Crystal:1969: 254, see also p.288-290). Dwight Bolinger defines clearly his stance in the preface of his monograph on intonation: “ … a speaker who composes an intonation is more artist than computer. He faces a canvas on which he must draw freehand. There are rules but they respond to feelings more directly than does any other well systematized part of spoken language. Emotion is always present, and ‘ideas’ are communicated metaphorically through the feeling that express them” (1986: viii). He compares some years earlier the way grammar makes use of emotive pitch patterns to “a sort of catch-as-catch-can” (1957: 36). To go around this hardly productive general debate, it seems more appropriate to formulate more limited questions, such as the role of intonation in resolving syntactic ambiguity (Kooij 1971, Hirst 1975, Di Cristo 1976, Boulakia 1978). Boulakia set forth three sources of ambiguity: (a) polysemy of lexical units, (b) double-meaning of the underlying deep structure, (c) equivocation of the surface structure. Lexical polysemy cannot be treated at the prosodic level; neither can we resolve by prosodic means the ambiguity inherent in the underlying structure (Kooij 1971). On the other hand, ambiguous surface structures offer a large scope for prosodic disambiguation (Lieberman 1967, Lehiste 1973, R.Wales and H.Toner 1979. Gee and Grosjean 1983, Ladd 1986, Crystal and House 1990, Price and al. 1999). Gee and Grosjean (1983) describe an algorithm that provides a mechanism from a syntactic pars to prosodic pars. Edges of major syntactic constituants are associated with larger prosodic phrases. According to Prince and al. (1991), “parentheticals”, i.e. metalinguistic pragmatic comments, such as “Mary knows many languages, you know”, involve larger break than the corresponding (homonymous) subordinate clause: “Mary knows many languages you know”, suggesting that ‘Mary and you have both learned many languages’ (oc.2967). P.Lieberman (1967) found that speakers can use prosody to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous strings of words where the location of syntactic bracketing differs: “[I’ll move on] Saturday” vs. “[I’ll move] [on Saturday]. ” It appeared from Ilse Lehiste’s perceptual study of sentence


29

pairs with different bracketing that of the 15 pairs 10 were successfully disambiguated (1973) syntactic boundary was marked by pause or laryngealization, or by lengthening the syllable preceding the boundary. Intonation reveals similarly in French speech the degree of connectedness (the syntactic distance, syntactic bracketing) between the constituents. In the French word sequence un acteur du cinéma muet the attribute muet could either (a) be directly connected with cinéma – cinéma muet ‘silent film’ - or (b) indirectly with acteur de cinéma muet ‘actor of silent films’. In the first case (a) acteur de cinéma is the “déterminé”, a compound subject to be ‘determined’, to be qualified, and muet figures as ‘déterminant’, as the qualifier. Intonation resolves the ambiguity: by means of a juncture following the qualified (‘déterminé’) and preceding the qualifier (‘déterminant’). The juncture may either follow actor, presented as the ‘déterminé’, as the subject to be qualified, and specified as film actor of mute films (acteur / de cinéma muet), or follow acteur de film presented as the ‘déterminé’, a compound subject qualified by the ‘déterminant’ muet as ‘mute, dumb’ (see Martins-Baltar 1977: 15 s.). Prosodic structure clearly reflects the syntactic grouping (bracketing) of the constituents. We owe to P.J. Price and collaborators a systematic analysis of the essential prosodic means of disambiguation. The phonetic analysis of 35 pairs of ambiguous pairs of sentences indicate that disambiguation relates primarily to boundary phenomena but also to prominence. They analysed seven types of syntactic ambiguity, also (a) far versus near (b) attachment sentences, similar to those analyzed by Martins-Baltar. Raoul murdered the man with a gun. (a) Near attachment: The murder weapon was not a knife but a gun’, (b) far attachment: Raoul’s bloodstained knife clinched the case for the murder. The location of a relatively large break index attached to a ‘far’ site appears to block the ‘near’ attachment (a). Similar prosodic solutions allow for marking the scope of negation, the presence or the absence of the “comma”, that is of the juncture, in expressions such as Il n’est pas venu (,) par ambition. If there is no juncture in the utterance, par ambition figures as an adverbial modifier of the predicate: Il n’est pas venu par ambition ‘He didn’t come for some ambitious purpose’. The preceding juncture transforms par ambition into a comment, a complementary statement, meaming, on the contrary, that he did come, for some ambitious purpose (Martins-Baltar o.c. p.120). Similarly, the deletion of the coma, i.e. of the juncture, preceding the subordinate close in Je ne suis pas venu, parce que j’étais malade ‘I didn’t come, because I was ill’ (Martins-Baltar o.c. 120) reduces the subordinate clause into a complement of the predicate, à cause de maladie ‘because of illness’. In both examples, the deletion of the juncture is accompanied by a change of intonation: a

30


melodic arch, a raising–falling pitch curve, joins the two parts of the utterance. An inverse procedure, the insertion of a juncture, may “liberate” an adverbial complement, transforming it into a pragmatic (meta-linguistic) comment. Il est mort naturellement ‘He died in a natural way’ > Il est mort, naturellement ‘He died, of course’. The complement separated by a juncture is conceived as an “external qualifier” circonstant externe, for Bernard Pottier (1967: 20). In these cases, the juncture changes the expression’s semiotic status. The prosodic expression of the meta-linguistic status is less easy if the comment is integrated into the sentence, and takes the same place like the adverb of the corresponding linguistic statement: (a)

Je suis bien à Paris ‘I enjoy to be in Paris’

(b)

Je suis bien à Paris ‘I am in Paris, isn’t it?’

(Martins-Baltar oc.16). Stress and pitch-accent highlights the adverb in the first sentence (a). - The absence of stress and pitch-accent mark the status of modal particle of bien in the second one (b). A slight divergence of the melodic course allows for the distinction of the Hungarian verbal prefix ki (out) and the homonymous interrogative pronoun ki (who). The prefix is characterized by a pitch falling from the outset, in contrast to the rising-falling pitch of the interroagative pronoun. The melodic line of the utterance introduced by ki is falling in both cases: ↘ Kiirta (He copied it out) and ↘ Ki irta? (Who wrote it?). – Stress and intonation may transform an adverbial complement into a para-linguistic comment. In the Hungarian utterance ↘ Biztosan ↘ futott (He run steadily) biztosan acts as an adverbial complement. Unstressed, pronounced on a level ton in Æbiztosan ↘ futott it functions as a para-linguistic comment, suggesting ‘Probably he was running’. In all these cases, intonation plays a distinctive role at the syntactic level. Stockwell (1972), Léon (1972), Cruttenden (1970) discern immediate and indirect distinctive function. In the last case, the distinctive role is derivative of the demarcative or the culminative function. For Cruttenden (oc.) the grammatical role of intonation is always secondary, and can be traced back to a primary function which is less complex from a semiotic (evolutionary) point of view. Let us consider some derivatives of a demarcative intonation form. Word sequences may be divided by means of junctures. Demarcation offers a ground for specific syntactic structures, depending on rhythmic and melodic


31

configuration superimposed on the successive segments. Essentially identical prosodic configurations characterize enumeration. “Frédé- ↗ ’rique / mon vois-↗ ’sin …” (‘Frederic, my neighbor…’). Demarcation may give rise to a different syntactic structure, apposition, if the tonal level is depressed in the second rhythmic group, and tonal movement compressed: que i r Frédésin mon voi----------------------------------------

The similarity of movement suggests a semantico-syntactic parallel, the tonal depression of the second group expresses, however, its subordination. Both prosodic models, based on the demarcative function, are clearly distinct: suggesting either enumeration or apposition. The enumerative melodic rhythmic pattern may get a different meaning if applied to a non enumerative syntactic pattern. In a recorded conversation between two young women (then teaching assistants at the Institute of Phonetic of the University of Paris), one of the participants speaks with irony of a type of film critic: C’est un ↗ ↘ film ↗ ↘ extraordinaire, ↗ ↘ c’est un documentaire, ↗ ↘ puis on en fait ↗ ↘ une interprétation ↗ ↘ marxiste ou catholique ↗ ↘ et caetera et caetera…

The unstressed syllables constitute a straight line at mid-low level. The rises and falls in each phrase (marked ↗ ↘ before the phrase), succeed at regular intervals. We recognize the triangular French enumerative pattern. The pitch pattern evokes the attitude of the French critics and mimics their way of speaking. (It is a case of hidden reported speech.) The lack of internal pauses, the monotonous repetition of a melodic cliché show the condemnation of mechanical criticism based on preconceived ideas (cf. I. and J.Fónagy 1983). There are still other cases where the grammatical distinctive function of intonation cannot be deduced from emphasis or demarcation. The rising pitch of the principal clause followed by descent in the subsequent causal clause is a kind of musical translation of the logical structure of the sentence. A mental tension created by the first clause has to be resolved by the solution

32


provided by the causal clause. Intonation plays a concomitant role, according to the Prague phonological terminology (Projet de terminology 1971)1, since the relation of the subsequent phrases is clearly defined by the conjunction. In the absence of the conjunction (asyndeton) the logical relation between the two syntactically independent phrases is suggested by a rising–falling tonal pattern with a juncture in between: “↗ Nous ne sortirons pas / ↘ il gèle” (We won’t go out, it freezes) (cf. Bally [1941] 1965: 56 s., Martins-Baltar 1970, 1977). Intonation plays in that case a distinctive role though its meaning is less clearly defined than that of the conjunction ‘therefore’. In some cases it could be paraphrased by ‘nevertheless’: “↗ Il pleut / ↘ je vais sortir” (It rains, I’ll go out nevertheless). The causal meaning of the intonation pattern is quite frequent in French discourse, it can be considered as a “melodic cliché” (I.Fónagy, E.Bérard and J.Fónagy 1983: 18 s.). subsequente sentences. “↗ C’était un accident. ↘ C’était écrit dans les journaux” (This was an accident. The newspapers wrote about it.) pronounced by the waitress in Youri’s telefilm ‘Appelez-moi Rose (Call me [simply] Rose)’. ↗ “C’est un bélier ↘ Il a des cornes” (It’s a ram. [Since] It has horns) this critical comment has been pronounced by Georges Poujouli performing the role of the Little Prince in Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince” (see also: function of linking).. 13. Modal function Does the interrogative intonation pattern represent the interrogative mode, opposing it to the declarative or to the imperative mode? Roman Jakobson rejected this assumption in his classical paper as early as 1939: “The interrogative sentence is not a reference but only an appeal for reference” ([1939] 1971 SW 1: 289). Only the words question and assertion do represent modality as an object at the level of conceptual thinking; intonation allows for the distinction of the phenomena such as assertion (Aussage), injunction (Aufforderung), question (Frage), exclamation (Aufruf). The modal status of exclamatives is still far from uncontroversial (see the papers of Altmann, of Oppenrieder and Batliner, in Altmann ed. 1988). According to the prevailing views the expression of basic emotions can be considered as modal; opinions differ, however, concerning the criteria which allow to distinguish basic emotions of other emotive attitudes. According to Hans Altmann (1988a, in Meibauer ed.) modality implies the

1

The term “variation extraphonologique concomitante” refers to variantes “escorting phonological oppositions”. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague vol.4: 318).


33

presence of constant markers2. Modality is language dependent. Not the same emotions and attitudes are raised at the level of modality. In contrast to Indo-European languages, the Vogoul distinguishes probabilitative, necessitative, precative and pejorative mode. The prosodic expression of modality is more or less clearly defined, for different sentence types, in different languages. In a great number of languages binary (Yes or No) questions are clearly opposed at the prosodic level to statements3. The prosodic features of alternative questions and statements are less clearly defined, both in French and in Hungarian. A large margin is left for individual production of alternatives. The percentage of correct identification of French utterances varies between according the vocal performance of the speakers between 43 and 100% (see Fónagy and Bérard 1980). 14. Logical function? Alternative statements or questions – disjunctions from a logical point of view – may be either complete (inclusive) or exclusive. In exclusive disjunctions at most one of the terms of the disjunction is true. In complete (inclusive) disjunctions at least one of the terms is true, and both terms may be true at the same time. On the grounds of structural analogy between alternative statements and logical disjunction, some authors attribute a logical function to alternative statements (see Varga 1981). Semantic tests suggest, however, that speakers and hearers distinguish, in fact, two contrasting attitudes, a permissive (liberal) and a categorical (voluntary) attitude. At the prosodic level, exclusive statements induce tonal polarization: the melodic level is raised in the first term and lowered in the second term (Fónagy and Bérard 1980). 15. Function of identification The functions of identification were thrust into prominence by Pierre Léon ([1971] 1993: 21 ss.). In Léon’s phonostylistic model, prosodic signals and indexes (indices) serve as means of speaker identification. Semiotic indexes reveal the speaker’s emotive attitudes and his personality, linguistic indexes reflect his linguistic and social background (dialect, sociolect, 2

3

“…eine regelmässige Zuordnung eines Satztyps…mit angebbaren formalen Eigenschaften zu einer bestimmten Funktion im sprachlichen Handeln, die ich Funktionstyp nennen will” (Altmann oc.23). Martins-Baltar (1977: 62-63) uses the term of modality as a homonym of propositional attitude such as wish, judgment or feeling. In Hungarian, binary questions have three well established intonation variants in function stress position. The tonal movement which characterises the modality always occurs in the last stress group (see Varga 1983, Fónagy 1958) .

34


idiolect). The hearer dissociates the speaker’s recurrent, idiosyncratic emotive deviations from specific attitudes and he assigns the features directly to the speaker, just like other personal characteristics. They constitute his personal vocal style, a potential basis of vocal characterology. Pierre Léon studied in detail and in depth the vocal and prosodic characteristics of Charles De Gaulle (1971: 130-158). Two groups of hearers were invited - after having listened to some short passages of Jean Cocteau’s “La voix humaine” played by two French actresses, Gaby Morlay and Simone Signoret -, to fill in a biographical questionnaire with questions quite unrelated with Cocteau’s drama, such as ‘profession of the father’, ‘school achievement’, ‘her vestmental style’. The answers were surprisingly congruent. Gaby Morlay’s voice suggested a still very attractive young woman about 26 years old; with excellent school result without much learning, her father was well-to-do lawyer, she was always the one who left her partner, and for the overwhelming majority she was her father’s favorite (“fille à papa”). Simone Signoret’s vocal performance suggested a faded woman in her forties, at school she was ambitious, hardworking with mediocre results, they lived in a small way, she was the one who was left by her partner, and for the great majority she was mother’s favorite, “fille à maman” (for the details and acoustic data, see Fónagy 1983: 161-169). Prosodic stereotypes play a major part in the constitution of professional styles (I. and J.Fónagy 1976; P.Léon 1993: 164-183). The stylistic characteristics (phonostyle, stylèmes according to Léon oc. 157-183) are demotivated, banalized remainders of emotive vocal and prosodic features. T.L. Face (2003) found significant prosodic divergences between declaratives spontaneous and in laboratory speech. The function of identification could be extended to the distinctive prosodic features of verbal genres such as: poetry, literary, prose, fairy tales, news bulletin, political speeches, lectures and conversation. The laryngograph (Fabre 1957, Fourcin and Abberton 1972) seems to be the most appropriate tool to isolate prosodic features and show their contribution to the identification of verbal genres. The laryngograph derives prosodic information directly from the vocal fold in motion. In the resulting product, only the prosodic features, essentially changes in fundamental frequency and speed of utterance are preserved. Laryngographic recordings of different type of communication – a lyrical poem (Verlaine), a tragedy (Corneille), a fairy tale (Perrault), a news bulletin, a piece of conversation – were presented to French students in the frame of a free and a forced choice test (Fónagy 1978). The results revealed


35

a striking consistency and accuracy of the subjects both in the open-ended and in the forced choice task. The hypothesis that the prosodic pattern of verbal genre is sufficiently characteristic to be correctly identified on the basis of laryngographic recordings was borne out for several types of communication. An interesting confusion occurred in the identification classical tragedy frequently taken for a political discussion. The lack of any sort of confusion in the case of conversation renders the uniqueness of conversational style quite conspicuous. Recordings of French and Hungarian samples show that the speakers follow the same prosodic strategy in both languages to comply with the demands of the different verbal genres (Fónagy and Magdics 1967, Lucci and Boë 1977, Lucci 1979, 1983). The same speakers regularly raise the frequency level of spontaneous conversation if lecturing. The melodic movement is more lively, i.e. the tonal changes less predictable in conversation than in “free” (improvised) lectures though still less predictable than in lectures read. By chance, we could record an involuntary change of pitch level in the vocal performance of Mrs F.R. During her lecture, the microphone produces a noise by auto-excitation. “Ça y est, ça commence à faire du bruit (That’s all I need, it makes a noise now)”, and her voice drops with a major third during her pragmatic comment. Then she goes on, raising her voice to the level of lecturing. The diverse varieties of lecturing - university lectures, reading fairy tales, reading of news bulletins -, are characterized at the prosodic level by the recurrence of a small number of rhythmic and melodic patterns. Melodic arches, consisting in a gradual descent followed by a gradual tonal raise, are frequent in reading, especially in that of fairy tales, lending them a wavy complexion, in contrast to the angular pitch curve (sudden changes of tonal movement) of news bulletins. Pitch movements are more redundant in lectures read than in free (improvised) lecturing, and both are redundant as compared to pitch movements in conversation (Fónagy 1982). The speaker, asked to read aloud the text of her recorded free lecture, rises the melodic level and simplifies the melodic configurations (see oc.). - ‘Liveliness’ of live speech is partly due to the frequent contrast (contradiction) between prosodic and syntactic structure. 16. Exploratory function The prosodic events could be conceived as attempts to realize certain acts transposed to the vocal level. The expression of anger incorporates the vocal substitutes of physical aggression: laryngeal constriction could be regarded as a symbolic attempt of strangling the enemy; the sudden rises in pitch could correspond to successive outburst of aggression, substituting for

36


sudden blows. The radical reduction of melodic intervals in anguish could be a melodic pantomime of a man paralyzed with fear (see: expressive function II). 17. Aesthetic function The reiteration and variation of melodic structures in narration is comparable to the role of repetition and variation in musical compositions. Melodic clichés are in between speaking and singing. The high degree of redundancy characterizing singing and musical performance is present in melodic clichés both at the level of the vibration of the vocal folds and in the quasi musical tonal intervals between the subsequent syllables. Descent in quarter tones in clichés such as Oh qu’il est mignon. The third dimension, the degree of musicality (stylization) may become distinctive, Hopi Indians distinguish between tawi ‘singing’, tengawa ‘solemn declaration, and lawyi ‘everyday speech’. Stylized intonation is an expression of irony in Turkish: şeker çocuk ‘sweet child’ (Haimann 1990). 18. Ludic function We could see in melodic clichés, in this sort of flirting with music, an essential manifestation of playing with language. In conversation and lecturing the last syllables of the utterance may shift into musical language: the last rhythmical group of the utterance shows a high degree of inter- and intra-syllabic redundancy. The utterance, more or less solemnly, closes with a highly stylized and conventionally regulated rhythmic and musical pattern. Such closure formulas were largely used in Classical languages (Lausberg 1960, 1:479-506). Closures, as well as other melodic clichés, are reproduced with great precision in ‘echoing’-tests (I. and J.Fónagy and J.Sap 1979). The sudden switch of question melody into imperative sentence or declarative patterns taking the place of question patterns or imperatives turning into questions, questions into statements - may recall exchange of positions and partners in dancing parties. The utterance more or less solemnly closes with a highly stylized and conventionally regulated rhythmic and musical pattern. Dynamic melodic performances of high complexity, such as the intonation patterns of irony or coquetry could be seen as dramatic performances: vocal pantomimes. The gradual rise in sermons or other more or less solemn verbal performances followed by a gradual or short fall, is also, independently of content conveyed, a tension / resolution game. In the same playful perspective we could think of the superposition (integration) of different melodic patterns to the innocent misbehavior of


37

children imposing a new graphic creation on one or more preceding ones. It would be more justified to compare the superposition of two (or three) melodic pattern in artistic vocal creation to polyphony in vocal or instrumental music, where in interference of diverse patterns successfully expresses complex attitudes or differentiated mental contents. 19. Function of condensation Sven Oehman (1968) proposed a model accounting for the superposition of stress, tone (accent) and intonation. Utterances produced by vocal artists are often felt as particularly ‘dense’. Semantic and ‘echoing tests’ reveal that such utterences condense indeed two or more superimposed simple melodic patterns. The sentence Az én hibám volt “It was, resp. was it my fault” spoken by the Hungarian artist József Timár, in the role of Willy in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman elicited in a shadowing tests sharply falling categorical statements as well as rising falling interrogative utterances. The echoed utterance was in fact prosodically ambivalent: a successful crossing of a deep self reproach and an indignant protest. Hamlet’s soliloquy “By sleep to say” pronounced by the Hungarian artist Miklós Gábor was interpreted and reproduced by 20 Hungarian informants consequently in four different ways. The superposition of the four simple melodic patterns produced a pitch curve quite similar to that of the artist’s complex intonation pattern (I. and J.Fónagy 1986). 20. The hierarchy of functions The functions, individually considered above, are intimately joined in speech. The verbal genres differ according the degree of participation of the individual functions. The demarcative function is omnipresent. It takes a particularly important part in narration and in scientific communication. Whereas boundary signals often vanish in the heat of the debate. Emphasis is inherently allusive. It is prevalent in pedagogical or political discourse. In fact, they are omnipresent in all speech acts, and from an evolutive point of view, they constantly reproduce in live speech the successive stages of intonation’s functional history. The diverse forms of dislocation play simultaneously different roles: demarcation, focusing, presentation. At the same time, at a preconscious or unconscious level, they fulfill the exploratory function in form of a vocal pretend action, an aggression directed against language itself: the sentence is torn into pieces. This could satisfy the ludic function as verbal form of childish mischief. Pretend actions (symbolic action, Symbolhandlungen) come to the fore in emotive speech, when the speaker is “throttling his own throat” (laryngeal

38


constriction, strangled voice). At the same time, aggressive acting out appears at a much later phase of evolution, at the level of fictitious spatial movements, mimicking a struggle underlying angry arguments: rigid corporal position interrupted by repeated sudden blows. The undulatory melodic curve of tender speech contains a tonal allusion to caressing movements. If two F0 curves differ only in their angularity, the utterances with a more angular F0 function are rated as being significantly more aggressive than their smoother counterparts (I.Fónagy, J.Fónagy and J.Sap 1979). The domesticated form of aggression is also present in the metrical structure of speech melody: we beat the time. The focalization of expressive bodily behavior at the glottal level is the result of a gradual evolution in prosodic history. Basic emotions such as anger, joy cannot be reliably distinguished on the basis of mere changes in fundamental frequency; in contradistinction to more complex social attitudes (oc.) Vocal expression of social attitudes can easily dispense with oral mimetics. They are at the same time more language dependent than emotional vocal displays. The high degree of tonal precision corresponds to a higher degree of semantic organization. Modal intonation patterns represent the highest level of melodic and semantic organization that can be reached by prosodic means. Attitudinal intonation patterns are always felt stylistically marked. Modal intonation patterns may be neutral. Even if we could draw a demarcation line between moods and attitudes, this would not prevent melodic configurations switching unperceived from one category to the other. Steep rise and sudden fall characterize in English, German or Hungarian control-questions expressing mistrust or irony in connection with a previous statement (↗ Rea-↘ ly). This stylistically marked intonation pattern of Russian echo-questions became during the first half of the eighteenth century the dominant, unmarked Russian intonation pattern of binary (Y/N) questions. An ascensional force seems to elevate primary functions towards functions of a higher, more complex functional level. Demarcative or culminative pitch patterns may become distinctive. The emotive contrast underlying hesitant utterances yields alternative statements which anticipate logical opposition: inclusive vs. exclusive disjunctions. Playful melodic metaphors may fill in the gap of a lacking syntactic category. The question pattern lent to injunctive. Hungarian utterances brought about the category of polite invitation in Czech, in Hungarian as well as in Australian English (Fónagy 1966, 1967, 1969, 1979). Even demotivation (banalization) of expressive melodic patterns may become expressive in characterising professional prosodic styles, such as the prosodic clichés of newscasters


39

(Léon 1993: 157-212). References Abe, Isamu 1998. Intonation in Japanese. In: D.Hirst and A. Di Cristo ed. Intonation Systems. 360-375 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Altmann, Hans 1987. Zur Problematik der Konstitution der Satzmodi als Formtypen. In: J.Meibauer ed.22-56. Altmann, Hans ed. 1988. Intonationsforschungen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Aristoxenos 1868. Harmonische Fragmente, ed. P.Marquand. Berlin: Weidmann. Arnold, Magda 1960. Emotion and personality, vol.1. Psychological aspects. New York: Columbia University Press. Artëmov, V.A. 1962. Tone and intonation. In: Proceeding of the Fourty International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Helsinki 1961, 403-406. The Hague: Mouton Auchlin, Antoine et Ferrari, A. 1994. Structure prosodique, syntaxe, discours: évidences et problèmes. Cahiers de Linguistique 15: 187-217. Bally, Charles 1941. Intonation et syntaxe. Cahiers de Ferdinand de Saussure 1: 33-42. Bally, Charles 1965. Linguistique générale et linguistique française. Berne: Francke. Battliner, Anton 1988. Der Exklamativ: mehr als Aussage oder doch nur mehr oder weniger Aussage? Experimente zur Rolle von Höhe und Position des F0-Gipfels. In: Altmann ed.243-272. Beckman, M. and Pierrehumbert, J. 1986. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonological Yearbook 3: 255-309. Bérard, Eva 1996. L'expressivité vocale dans la parole chantée. Semiotica 111: 295-317. Berkowitz, L. 1962. Aggression: A social psychological analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill. Berrendonner, A. 1990. Pour une macro-syntaxe. Travaux de Linguistique 21: 25-36. Bing, Janet 1980. Aspects of English prosody. Bloomington: Indiana Press. Bing, Janet 1984. A discourse domain identified by intonation, in: Intonation, accent and rhythm: Studies in discourse phonology. New York: De Gruyter. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire 1975. Recherches en vue d’une théorie de la grammaire française : essai d’application à la syntaxe des pronoms. Paris : Champion. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire 1990. Le français parlé. Etudes grammaticales. Paris: éditions du CNRS.

40


Blanche-Benveniste, Claire 1997. Approches de la langue parlée en français. Paris: Ophrys. Bloomfield. Leonard 1933. Language. New York: Holt & co. London: Allen & Unwin. Bolinger, Dwight 1957. Intonation and grammar. Language Learning 8: 31-37. Bolinger, Dwight 1986. Intonation and its parts. Melody in spoken English. Stanford (CA). Stanford University Press. Boulakia, Georges 1978. Phonosyntaxe. Thèse de doctorat. Université de Paris VII. Brazil. D. 1995. A grammar of speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bühler, Karl 1934. Sprachtheorie. Jena: Fischer. Cooper, W. and Sorensen, J. 1977. Fundamental frequency contours in syntactic boudaries, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 62: 683-692. Cruttenden, Alan 1970. On the so-called grammatical function of intonation. Phonetica 21: 182-192. Cruttenden, Alan 1981. Falls and rises: meanings and universals. Journal of Linguistics 17: 77-92. Crystal, David 1969. Prosodic systems and intonation in English. Cambridge: University Press. Crystall, T.H. and House, A.S. 1990. Articulation rate and the duration of syllables and stress groups in connected speech. J.Acoustic Soc.Am. 83: 101-112. Daneš, František 1960. Sentence intonation from a functional point of view. Word 16: 34-35. Darwin, Charles 1872. The expression of emotions in man and animals. London: Murray Dascălu-Jinga, L. 1971. Some remarks on enumerative intonation in Romanian. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 16: 401-410. Deulofeu, José 1977. La syntaxe et les constructions binaires. Recherches sur le Français Parlé 1: 30-61. Di Cristo, Albert 1976. Indices prosodiques et structures constituante. Cahiers de Linguistique d’Orientalisme et de Slavistique 7: 27-40. Duez, Danielle 1985. Perception of salient pauses in continuous speech. Language and Speech 28: 377-389. Essen, Otto von 1956. Grundzüge der Hochdeutschen Satzintonation. Rattingen: Henn. Essen, Otto von 1957. Allgemeine und angewandte Phonetik [1953]. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Faure, Georges 1962. Recherches sur les caractères et le rôle des éléments musicaux dans la prononciation anglaise. Paris: Didier. Fónagy, I. 1958. Elektrophysiologische Beiträge zur Akzentrage. Phonetica


41

2: 12-58. Fónagy, I. 1966. “Api, figyelje ide [Daddy, listen]!” Dallammetafora és dallamváltozás [Intonation metaphor and change of intonation].” Magyar Nyelvőr 90: 121-138. Fónagy, I. 1969. Métaphore d’intonation et changement d’intonation. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 64: 22-42. Fónagy, I. 1971. Synthèse de l’ironie. Phonetica 23: 42-51. Fónagy, Ivan 1978. A new method of investigating the perception of prosodic features. Language and Speech 21: 34-49. Fónagy, Ivan 1980. La métaphore en phonétique. Ottawa: Didier Fónagy, Ivan 1981. Emotions, voice and music. In: J.Sundberg ed. Research aspects on singing, 137-152. Stockholm: The Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Fónagy, I. 1981. Fonction prédictive de l’intonation. Studia Phonetica 18: 113-122. Fónagy Ivan 1982. Variation et normes prosodiques. Folia Linguistica 16: 17-38. Fónagy Ivan 1989. On status and functions of intonation. Acta Linguistica Hungarica39: 53-92. Fónagy Ivan 1991. La vive voix. Essais de psycho-phonétique [1983]. Paris: Payot. Fónagy Ivan 2001. Languages within Language: An evolutive approach. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: Benjamins. Fónagy, Ivan et Bérard, Eva 1980. Bleu ou vert? Analyse et synthèse des énoncés disjonctifs. In" L.R.Waugh et C.H.van Schoeneveld eds. The melody of language, 81-114. Fónagy, Ivan et Bérard, Eva 1996. Statut dynamique des énoncés exclamatifs: substances et fonctions. L’analisi linguistica e letteraria 4: 307-338. Fónagy, Ivan, Bérard, Eva et Fónagy, Judith 1983. Clichés mélodiques. Folia linguisctica 17: 153-185 Fónagy, Ivan et Judith 1976. Prosodie professionnelle et changements prosodiques. Le Français Moderne 44: 193-228. Fónagy, I. and Judith 1983. L’intonation et l’organisation du discours. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 78: 161-209. Fónagy, I., Fónagy, Judith and J.Sap 1979. A la recherche des traits prosodiques dans le français parisien. Phonetica 1: 1 –20. Fónagy, I.; Hand, M.H. and Simon, Pela 1983 Oral gesturing in two unrelated languages. In: Investigations of the speech process. Quantitative Linguistics 19. Ed.: P.Winkler, 103-122. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Fónagy, Ivan, Lucci, Vincent et Boë, L-J. 1977, Traits prosodiques distinctifs

42


de certaines attitudes intellectuelles et émotives. In: Textes des Huitièmes Journées d’Études Fónagy, Ivan et Magdics, Klara 1967. A magyar beszéd dallama [Mélodies du discours hongrois]. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Fónagy I. and P. 1979. Structure et aspects sociaux des changements prosodiques. In: Proceedings of the 9th international congress of phonetic sciences 204-211. Copenhagen: Institute of Phonetics Fourcin, A.J. et Abberton, E. 1971. First application of a new laryngograph. Volta Review 74: 161-167. Freud, Sigmund 1926. Hemmung, Symptom und Angst [Inhibtion, symptôme et angoisse]. in: GW 14: 113-205; SE 20: 87-171. Gee, J.P. and Grosjean, F. 1983. Performance structure; a psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal. Cognitive Psychology 15: 411-454. Geerrs, A. 1978. Intonation contour and syntactic structure as predictors of apparent segmentation. J.Exp.Psychology: Human Perceptual Performance 4: 273-283. Gibbon, Dafydd 1976. Perspectives of intonation analysis. Frankfurt München: Lang. Gleason, H.A. 1965. Linguistics and English grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Grammont, Maurice 1964. Le vers français, ses moyens d’expression, son harmonie. Paris: Delagrave. Grosjean, François. 1983. How long is the sentence. Prediction and prosody in the on-line processing of language. Linguistics 21: 501-529. Haiman, John 1990. Sarcasm as theatre. Cognitive Linquistics 1: 181-205. Hargreaves, W.A. et Starkweather, J.A. 1963. Recognition of speaker identity. Language and Speech 6: 63-67. Harsgrove, P.M. et McGarr, N.S. 1994. Prosody management of communication disorders. San Diego: Singular Publishing Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine 1983. Le rôle de l’intonation dans la définition et la structuration de l’unité de discours. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 78: 99-160. Hind, Anthony 1977. Place et fonction de l’intonation dans une grammaire. Thèse de doctorat d’état. Université de Paris VII. Hirsch-Pasek,K. et al. 1987. Clauses are perceptual units for young infants. Cognition 26: 269-286. Hirst, J.Daniel 1975. Syntactic ambiguity and intonative features. VIII.Congrès International de Sciences Phonétiques (Leeds), publié aussi dans les Travaux de Phonétiques d’Aix (1976) Hollien, Harry 2002. Forensic voice identification. San Diego: Academic Press.


43

Jakobson, Roman 1962-1988. Selected Writings tomes 1-8, ed. Rudy, Stephen. Berlin, Jakobson, Roman 1971 a. Zur Struktur des Phonems [1939]. Selected writings 1: 280-310. Karcevskij, Serge 1931. Sur le phonologie de la phrase. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 4: 188-227. Klatt, D.H. 1975. Vowel lengthening in syntactically determined in a connected discourse. J. of Phonetics3: 129-140. Kličnikova, Z.I. 1965. Intonatsia kak sredstvo svjazi castei složnogo predloženija [Intonation as a means of connection between the parts of compound sentences]. In: Artëmov V.A. ed. Intonatsia i zvukovoj sostav. Moscow: Izdatelstvo Moskogo Universitatea 151-149. Kooij, J.G. 1971. Ambiguity in natural language. Amsterdam: North Holland, chap.3. Ladd, Daniel R. 1980. The structure of intonational meaning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ladd, Daniel R. 1986. Intonational phrasing: the case of prosodic structure. Phonologic Yearbook 3: 311-340. Lambrecht, Knud 1987. On the status of SVO sentences in French discourse. In: Tomkin, R. S. Coherence and grounding in discourse: 217-261. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. Lausberg, Heinrich 1960. Handbuch der literarische Rhetorik, vols 1-2. München: Huebner. Lee, W.R. 1956. English intonation: a new approach. Lingua 5: 345-371 Lee, W.R 1960. An English intonation reader. London. MacMillan. Lehiste, Ilse 1973. Phonetic disambiguation of syntactic ambiguity. Glossa 7: 107-121. Léon, Pierre 1970. Systématique des fonctions expressives de l’intonation. Studia Phonetica 3: 56-71. Léon, Pierre R. 1971. Essais de phonostylistique. Ottawa: Didier. Léon, Pierre R. 1972. Où en sont les études sur l’intonation? In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Montréal 1971), 113-154. Basel: Karger. Léon, Pierre R. 1993. Précis de phonostylistique. Ottawa: Didier Lieberman, P. 1967. Intonation, perception and language. MIT. Research monographs no.38. Cambridge MA: MIT. Press Loveday, L. 1981. Pitch, politeness and sexual role; an exploratory investigation into the pitch correlates of English and Japanese politeness formulae. Language and Speech 24, 1: 71-89. Lucci, Vincent 1979. L’accent didactique. In: I.Fónagy et P.R.Léon éds. L’accent en français contemporain, Studia Phonetica 15: 107-122

44


Lucci, Vincent 1983. Etude phonétique du français contemporain à travers la variation. Grenoble: Publications de l’Université des Langues et Lettres de Grenoble. Mahl, Georg F. et Schulze, Gene 1964. Psychological research in the extralinguistic area. In: T.A.Sebeok et al. eds. Martin, Philippe 1973. Les problèmes de l'intonation: recherches et applications. Langue Française 19: 4-32. Martin, Philippe 1977. Syntax and intonation: an integrated theory. Victoria University Monographs. Working Papers 2. Martinon, Ph. 1913. Comment on prononce le français. Paris: Larousse. Martins-Baltar, Michel 1970. La structure si + imparfait. Paris: École Normale Supérieure de St.Cloud. Martins-Baltar, Michel 1977. De l’énoncé à l’énonciation: une approche des fonctions énonciatives. Paris: Credif. Didier Mathesius V. 1937. K teorii vétné intonace [On the theory of sentence intonation]. Slovo a Slovesnost 3: 248-249 Meibauer, J. ed. 1987. Satzmodus zwischen Grammatik und Pragmatik. Referate anlässlich der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft [Heidelberg 1986]. Moses, Paul 1954. The voice of neurosis. New York: Grune & Stratton. Moses, Paul 1957. Vocal elements of disturbed communication. Practica Oto-Rhino- Laryngologica 19: 252-257. Muller Bing, Janet 1985. Aspects of English Prosody. Garland Press, New York (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics). Näf, Anton 1987. Gibt es Exklamativsätze? In: Meibauer.J. ed. 140-160. Nicaise, Alain 1987. Phénomènes intonatifs en français: de la perception à l’interprétation. Thèse de doctorat, Université de Paris 7. Oehman, Sven 1968. A model of word and sentence intonation. Report of the Sixth International Congress of Acoustics [Tokyo] 2: 163-166. Oppenrieder, Wilhelm 1988. Intonation und Identifikation. Kategorisierungstets zur Kontext- freien Identifikation von Satzmodi. In: Altmann ed.153-168 Ostendorf, M. et al. 1990. The use of relative duration in syntactic disambiguation. In: Proc. of the 3rd DAROA workshop on speech and natural language, ed. Morgan Kaufman. San Mateo (CA). Ostwald, Peter F. 1973. The semiotics of human sound. The Hague: Mouton. Perrot, Jean 1978. Fonctions syntactiques, énonciation, information. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 73: 85-101. Péter, Mihály 1934. Érzelemkifejezés, stílusérték és expresszivitás a nyelvben [Expression of emotins, style value and expressivity in language]. Általános Nyelvészeti Tanulmányok15: 219-235. Pierrehumbert, J. 1981 Synthesizing intonation. J.Acoust. Soc.Am.70: 985-


45

995. Pike, Kenneth 1945. The intonation of American English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Publications. Pilch, Herbert 1972. La théorie de la phonologie. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Montréal 1971), 105-119. Basel: Karger. Pilch, Herbert 1977. Intonation in discourse analysis. Phonetica 34: 81-92. Pilch, Herbert 1980. English intonation as phonological structure. Word 32: 55-37 Plutchik, Robert 1962. The emotions: facts, theories: a new model. New York: Random House. Plutchik, Robert 1980. Emotions: a psychoevolutionary theory. New York: Harper. Pottier, Bernard 1967. Présentation de la linguistique. Paris: Klincksieck Projet de terminologie phonologique standardisée 1941. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 4: 318-326. Riemann, K.W.J. Hugo 1882. Musik-Lexicon. Leibzig: Brockhaus. Rigault, André 1964. Réflexions sur le statut phonologique de l'intonation. Proc. 9th Int. Congr. Ling. Cambridge (Mass): 849-858. Romportl, Milan 1973. Studies in phonetics. Prague: Academia Sabio, Frédéric 1991. Micro-syntaxe et macro-syntaxe. Recherches sur le Français Parlénº13: 111-155. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1976. Cours de linguistique générale [1916], ed.T.de Mauro. Paris: Payot Scherer, Klaus R, 1981. Speech and emotional states. In: J.Darby et J.Q. Simons eds. Speech evaluation in psychiatry, 189-220. New York: Grune & Stratton Scherer, Klaus R. 1982. Methods of research in vocal communication: Paradigms and parameters. In: K.Scherer et P.Ekman 136-198. Scherer, Klaus R. 1984. On the nature and function of emotion. In: K.Scherer et P.Ekman 293-318. Scherer, Klaus R. et Ekman, Paul eds. 1982. Handbook and and methods in nonverbal behavior research. Cambridge: University Press. Scherer, Klaus R. et Ekman, Paul eds. 1984. Approaches to emotion. Hillsdale N.J.: Erlbaum. Scholes, R. 1971. On the spoken disambiguation of superficially ambiguous sentences. Language and Speech 14: 1-11. Scot, D. 1982. Duration as a cue to the perception of a phase boundary. J.Acoust.Soc.Am.71: 996-1007. Simon, Anne Catherine 2004. La structuration prosodique du discours en français. Une approche multidimensionnelle et expérentielle. Bern,

46


Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang. Stockwell R.P. 1972. The role of intonation; reconsiderations and other considerations [1971]. In: D.Bolinger ed. Intonation, 87-109. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Streeter, L.A. 1978. Acoustic determinants of phrase boundary perception. J. Acoust. Soc.Am.64: 1582-1592. Tench, P. 1996. The intonation system of English. London: Cassel. Tomkins, Silvan S. 1962. Affects, imagery, consciousness, vol.1: Positive emotions, Tübingen: Niemeyer. vol.2: Negative emotions. New York: Springer. Torsueva, I.G. 1979. Intonacia i smysle vysazyvania [Intonation and the meaning of the utterance]. Moskva: Nauk. Varga, László 1981. A magyar intonáció - funkcionális szempontból [Hungarian intonation - from a functional point of view]. Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 83: 313-319. Varga, László 1983. Hungarian sentence prosody: an outline. Folia Linguistica 17: 117-151. Varga, Lászlo 1995. Stylization of the falling tone in Hungarian intonation. In: Windsor,L.J.ed. Studies in general and English phonetics. Essays in honour of Professor J.D.O‘Connor. 278-287. London: Routledge. Wales, R. and Toner, H. 1979. Intonation and ambiguity. In: Sentence processing, ed. Cooper, W.C. and Walker, E.C.T. Hillsdale: NJ.: Erlbaum. Wunderlich, Dieter 1988. Der Ton macht die Melodie - Zur Phonologie der Intonation des Deutschen. In: Altmann ed.1-40.

Prosodic Constituents in French — A Data-Driven Approach — Jacqueline VAISSIÈRE and Alexis MICHAUD 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to provide a cross-linguistic perspective on prosody and syntax, starting out from French data. The present account of the relations between prosody and syntax in French builds on research that deals specifically with this language; it is however written with a view to contributing to cross-linguistic investigation: prosodic typology arguably holds the key to major progress in this field. Despite common underlying principles (Bolinger 1978, Vaissière 1995), there are major cross-language differences. The discussion brings out characteristics that sharply distinguish French from languages that possess lexically distinctive stress, addressing the thorny issue of cross-linguistic prosodic description. 1.1. Use of terms How terms are defined is especially crucial in prosodic studies. Prosody as defined here consists of accentuation, intonation and several performance factors (including rhythm). Accentuation includes all nonphonemic lexically distinctive properties, i.e. (depending on the language) stress, as in English, tone, as in Mandarin, pitch accent, as in Japanese and Swedish, voice quality register, as in Southeast Asian languages such as Mon. Intonation, which is often (and perhaps somewhat abusively) identified with the parameters whereby it manifests itself—and especially with fundamental frequency—, is a complex, abstract structure, that can usefully be divided into (i) two sub-systems of structuration: syntactic intonation, which essentially reflects syntax in the broader sense (the relationship between syntax and syntactic prosody will be elaborated on below), and pragmatic intonation, which reflects information structure; (ii) attitudinal and emotional dimensions, that convey speaker attitudes and emotions1. These definitions elaborate on proposals by Coustenoble and Armstrong 1937, Delattre 1965, 1966, and closely resemble those put forward by Rossi 1967, 1999 (see also the terminological discussion in Di Cristo 1998, and the 1

The interesting topic of how speaker-specific habits come to pattern into a personal style, and beyond, into dialect-specific characteristics, will not be addressed here.

48

Jacqueline VAISSIÈRE and Alexis MICHAUD

introduction to the volume [Hirst and Di Cristo 1998]). The phrase “syntactic intonation” may appear as somewhat of a misnomer, insofar as syntax and intonational phrasing do not stand in a strict, one-to-one relationship with syntactic units, as was already noted in the early classics of phonetics (Grammont 1933; see also, more recently, Selkirk 1972, 2000:231, Martin 1981). The phrase “syntactic intonation” is nonetheless retained in view of the fact that knowledge of a sentence’s syntax offers a sufficient basis for the synthesis of an acceptable fundamental frequency contour (Vaissière 1971). The acoustic correlates of prosody are many. They include the variations in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity, voice quality (mode of vibation of the vocal folds), and also the allophonic variations in the realisation of the segments (intrinsic and cointrinsic characteristics, which are uncontrolled, should be factored out of prosodic analysis). Said differently, prosody has correlates at the respiratory level, at the glottis, and at the supra-glottic level. All parameters take part in prosody simultaneously, to a greater or lesser extent. 1.2. Empirical basis for the present proposal: A data-driven approach based on read speech The adequacy of data-driven prosodic models is assessed on the basis of whether they attain their immediate goal and account for the body of data chosen as corpus. Our own research into intonation originally hinged on syntax, for the sake of synthesis (Vaissière 1971), language comparison (Vaissière 1983), language recognition (Vaissière 1988), and more recently for teaching French prosody to students of French, and using prosody in speech therapy. To a certain extent, all data-driven models depend on the corpus they are based on. Studies of read speech quite predictably focus on syntactic intonation. The reader has access to the structure of the sentence as a whole, and can evaluate the length of its parts and their semantic relations, and organise his production in consequence. The preplanning which this allows is reflected in the structuring of the sentences; prosodic structures emerge (the plural structures will be discussed below). In the 1970s, text-to-speech synthesis (together with the advent of generative grammar) fuelled interest in the relationship between syntactic and intonational constituents in read speech; the two are similar but not equivalent. (The development of automatic recognition of continuous speech also directed the researchers’ attention to these same issues.) The use of read speech was a useful abstraction: the congruence between syntactic and prosodic units is stronger in read than in spontaneous speech, in sentences outside context than in continuous texts.

Prosodic Constituents in French

49

2. An overview of syntactic intonation in French A representation of syntactic prosody should be detailed enough to specify all the contrasts that lead to a difference in the syntactic interpretation of the sentence (and hence provide a basis for a synthesis-byrule program which aims to maximally enhance the intelligibility of the output signal). 2.1. The salience of intonational phenomena in French, due to the absence of lexically distinctive stress French lends itself especially well to a study of postlexical prosodic structuration, because the constraints imposed by the lexical level (i.e. accentuation; see our definition above) are minimal. The sense-group is the basic unit. Since the earliest accounts of French prosody, researchers have noted the predominance of groupe de sens, i.e. sense-group boundaries, over word boundaries in French (Grammont 1933, Coustenoble et al. 1937, Delattre 1966). The words may lose—partly or completely—their acoustical identity to a higher-level constituent (i.e. word boundaries may go unmarked). French is generally considered as a ‘rising’ language with final lengthening. An insightful account of French prosodic phrasing was proposed by Delattre 1966 (usefully complemented by Fónagy 1980). The French ear is trained to perceive continuation at the end of a prosodic phrase. In this sense, French is a ‘rising’ language: each prosodic phrase inside a sentence tend to end with a sharp rise (Delattre’s continuation majeure), or a smaller rise, or a high F0 value (Delattre’s continuation mineure). In the babbling of French infants, rising F0 contours and final-syllable lengthening are most frequent (whereas falling F0 contours and an absence of final lengthening are most frequent for Japanese children: see Hallé, de Boysson-Bardies et al. 1991). To an adult French listener, the quasi-regular recurrence of strongly stressed syllables in English is striking, because the closest phonetic equivalent in French is emphatic stress, hence an impression of unceasing emphasis. To the untrained French ear, Japanese rhythm is somewhat puzzling, because the duration of a vowel primarily depends on its phonemic identity, not on the presence or absence of a boundary, and vowel lengthening may therefore occur in any position, whereas in French it is a cue to an intonational boundary. 2.2. The units defined by F0 fluctuations The units that are here proposed for the syntactic prosody of French and other languages are the prosodic paragraph, the sentence, the breath group, the melodic phrase, the prosodic phrase or phonological syntagm (variously

50


called minor group, accent group, sense group, syntagma in Russian, buntetsu in Japanese, or simply phonological phrase), the prosodic word, the foot (for a language like English), the syllable and the rhyme. We propose below a definition for each of them, based on observations concerning carefully read long sentences embedded in paragraphs, a speaking style which brings out different degrees of boundaries and prominences especially well. There are major discrepancies across researchers in the use of these terms; however appreciative we are of the research of others, we hold fast to our own definitions in this paper, for the sake of coherence and simplicity (hence the high number of self-references). We do not systematically attempt to provide cross-references to the terms used by other authors. 1) The paragraph is the largest unit. The highest F0 value in each sentence tends to decline from the first to the last sentence in a paragraph, in French and in other languages (Lehiste 1975). The end of the paragraph typically ends on an extra-low F0 (often leading to a change in voice quality) and intensity. 2) The sentence level is the next unit. The neutral, affirmative statement is taken as the basic, archetypal pattern (according to sentence mode, significant departures from this basic pattern are observed: Thorsen 1980). The F0 curve for the sentence rises to a peak typically located within the first lexical word, i.e. on one of the sentence’s first syllables. Falls and rises in F0 then alternate, within a gradually narrowed range. A final lowering marks the end of the sentence. (This corresponds to Tune 1 as described for English by Armstrong and Ward 1926.) The realisation of the final fall constrains the two final content words: the rise starts at the end of the penultimate word, and the contour over the last word is falling.

Figure 1. General outline of the F0 curve of an affirmative statement (after Vaissière 1983)


51

The sentence is further divided into breath groups and melodic phrases by returns to the baseline. A long sentence may be divided into two or more breath groups by inspiratory pauses; the structure of a breath group recalls that of the sentence as a whole. A breath group, whether sentence-final or not, is acoustically characterised at its beginning by a resetting of the baseline, an initial rise, generally ending at the beginning or end of the first content word, and by the return to the baseline (further characterised below). A melodic phrase is similar to a breath group except that inspiration does not actually take place as at the end of the breath group; inspiration is simulated—much as a large excursion in F0 can function as a signal of effort, even though it only simulates vocal effort: physiological necessity and linguistic structure interact closely (see Gussenhoven 2002 and references; Gendrot 2005). The melodic phrase is essentially equivalent to the group ending either in Delattre’s continuation majeure (realised as an F0 rise during the final syllable before a major boundary), or in Delattre’s finalité (a falling F0 movement spread over the word-final syllables).

Figure 2. Division of the sentence into two melodic phrases. General outline (left), and example with a randomly chosen sequence of syllables that ‘ride’ over the general shape (right). Triangles indicate word-initial syllables, empty circles indicate word-medial syllables, full circles word-final syllables, stars indicate grammatical words.

What is common to both types of melodic phrases (at least under our description) is a return to the baseline. F0 reaches and even goes under the baseline at the very end of the sentence-final melodic phrase. Nonfinal melodic phrases end in a continuation (see 2.1 above; this corresponds to Tune 2 of Armstrong et al. 1926). The return to the baseline before the final major continuation rise takes place (i) over the last syllable, or (ii) at the end of the penultimate (thereby suppressing the initial rise of the last disyllabic word), or again (iii) at the end of the preceding function word or of the penultimate word (the falling contour over the penultimate content word thus contrasting with the rising contour on the final word, a fact highlighted by Martin 1981). No hard-and-fast phonological evidence can be adduced to support this division into levels. There is no single, well-defined domain of application for rules such as liaison (i.e. whether a word-final consonant is pronounced

52


or not when the following word begins with a vowel): sometimes they apply across prosodic phrases, sometimes they do not. “Les soldats anglais” generally forms a single prosodic phrase (but two prosodic words) and the liaison is optional (sometimes replaced by a glottal stop). The baseline is a major notion in our description. Our way of modelling the observed data relies strongly on the baseline (also called declination line). F0 values tend to decline slightly during the course of a sentence, partly due to the decrease in sub-glottal pressure (Lieberman 1967) and to the tracheal pull (Maeda 1976). The baseline is speaker-dependent. Using what is commonly referred to as ‘Maeda’s method’ (Maeda 1976), the baseline is calculated visually by superposing the F0 contour of a number of isolated, declarative sentences of similar length and determining the upper line (plateau) and lower line (baseline). Our description gives a central role to the baseline for two reasons: it is relative stable as compared to the topline (or ‘plateau’) in the production data (for English, see, again, Maeda 1976); French listeners seem to be very sensitive to the fact that a syllable does or does not actually hit the baseline (Vaissière 1976). The declining baseline seems to serve a perceptual role as a reference line for the listeners (Pierrehumbert 1979). In a sentence-final melodic phrase, the baseline is reached at the very end of the melodic phrase. In a nonfinal melodic phrase, some variation is observed in the return to the baseline before the final rise: it takes place at the beginning or middle of the last syllable, or on the penultimate syllable (anticipatory lowering often takes place on the penultimate syllable of a content word before a major continuation rise), on the function word preceding the final word, or at the end of the penultimate content word.

Figure 3. Variation in the timing of the return to the baseline in French. Left: at beginning of last syllable; top right: on function word; bottom right: on end of penultimate content word (after Vaissière 2002)


4)

5)

Figure 4.

53

Melodic phrases can be further divided into two or more prosodic phrases. The prosodic phrase corresponds to the sense-group (and to Delattre’s minor continuation). It is composed of a single word, or of two or more semantically related words. The main acoustic difference between a melodic phrase and a prosodic phrase is the absence of a return to the baseline within the latter. Minor continuation is typically realised by a rise or a peak that is not preceded by a return to the baseline. The overall shape of a prosodic phrase strongly recalls that of a breath group, though the final rise is less salient. Final lengthening is generally (though not always) found at the end of a prosodic phrase. In turn, prosodic phrases are divided into prosodic words. The prosodic word corresponds, roughly speaking, to a content word. The alternation of lexical words with grammatical words (the latter realised less strongly, with lower F0) plays a role in French prosody that is to some extent comparable with the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in English. The division of a prosodic phrase into two prosodic words is realised phonetically either by final lengthening at the end of the first word, a strengthening of the beginning of the following word (glottal onset in the case of an initial vowel), or again by an F0 fluctuation aligned with the edge of one of the words. The feature “+ Strong” was borrowed from Straka with a view to covering the following manifestations: an F0 jump, a longer syllable onset, glottalisation, lesser nasalisation, less voicing, a stronger contact of the articulators (Vaissière 1986; for more recent results on French, Fougeron 2001).

Typical subdivision of a prosodic phrase into two prosodic words by F0 fluctuations. Left: Noun + Adjective sequence, right: Adjective + Noun (with indication of possible variants; see figure 6 for details).

Word-final lengthening can thus be the only marker of the division into prosodic phrases, without an F0 excursion: experiments in synthetic speech show that longer duration of the first syllable is a sufficient cue to the distinction between bordures (“rims”), ZaNQcx99Q\+and bords durs (“hard

54


edges”) ZaN9Qcx99Q\, between Jean-Pierre et Jacques (two names) and Jean, Pierre et Jacques (three names). (More precisely: if the first syllable is short, the phrase is ambiguous; beyond a certain length threshold, two prosodic phrases are heard; see Bacri and Banel 1993.) There are English equivalents, such as coffee-cake and honey vs. coffee, cake and honey (Lehiste, op. cit.). 2.3. The role of duration Like F0 fluctuations, the different degrees of final lengthening reflect prosodic structure; the two are not strictly equivalent, however. The use of prosodic parameters in automatic speech recognition has shown that informations on F0 and on duration are both essential in French to distinguish between a left- or right-boundary. The consonant-to-vowel length ratio also has to be taken into account. The three ‘classical’ intonational parameters, F0, duration and intensity, must all be adduced (Vaissière 1988, Nasri 1992, Langlais 1995); indeed, they can be usefully supplemented by other information, such as positional allophonic variation. (Even so, in the end, automatic separation cannot be achieved in all cases.) An important structural dimension of the sentence is encapsulated in pauses alone—what Monnin and Grosjean 1993 call ‘performance structure’. The degree of word-final lengthening distinguishes among at least three degrees of boundaries: sentence-internal prepausal lenghtening (the longest :::), phrase-final lengthening (::), and word-final lengthening (:). Six levels of syllable rhyme length can usefully be distinguished: (1) lengthening at the end of a non-sentence-final breath group; (2) sentence-final lengthening; (3) phrase-final lengthening; (4) word-final lengthening; (5) default length, on initial syllables of lexical words; (6) shortened duration for grammatical words (and word-internal syllables). As for syllable onset, it is longer in the initial syllable of a lexical word (Duez and Nishinuma 1985). Figure 5 presents a caricatural but revealing example, that of three sentences that are quasi-homophonous at the phonemic level: the sequence ZrDsNlDsdmNqldl@}aDs\ can correspond, depending on the intonation, to Cet homme est énormément bête (“This man is immensely stupid”), Cet homme est énorme et m’embête (“This man is huge and annoys me”), or to a highly implausible Cet homme et Ténor m’aiment en bête (“This man and Tenor love me as a beast”). The figure presents a dot for each syllable: an asterisk “*” for grammatical words (which show a strong tendency to be shorter, with lower F0 and intensity), and, for lexical words, a triangle for the initial syllable and empty circles for the next syllables, up to the final syllable (filled circle). The F0 curve (measured from one sentence) is stylised by retaining only one point per syllable, except for the parts of the curve which correspond to a right boundary, if the syllable concerned is lengthened and


55

therefore has the potential to carry an audible pitch movement within its rhyme: these are highlighted by a thicker line. Such examples allow for a direct comparison of observations on fundamental frequency and duration: they bring out clearly the fact that the syllable (more precisely the syllable rhyme) with the strongest rising slope corresponds to a major boundary (Delattre), and is accompanied by lengthening. This should be taken as an illustration of the potential of prosody as a cue to syntactic structure, rather than an indication of its actual role in communication, where there is hardly ever a threat of confusion between such pairs of sentences. The lengthened syllables are indicated.

Figure 5. F0 contour for sentences “Cet homme est énormément bête”, “Cet homme est énorme et m’embête” and “Cet homme et Ténor m’aiment en bête”, stylised using a star for grammatical words, a triangle for word-initial syllables (which can optionally host intonational intensification), an empty circle for lexical syllables that are neither initial nor final, and filled circles for word-final syllables. Each sentence is divided into two prosodic phrases (there is a full return to the baseline).

Within a sentence, the longer the final syllable of a word, the more rising its F0 curve, and the stronger the perceived boundary.2 Conversely, a falling contour indicates continuity, connectedness with what follows. Figure 6 illustrates how, in conjunction with the division into phrases, intonational variants convey semantic nuances, the syntactic dimension of intonation interacting with its pragmatic dimension.

2

There exists, however, a variant of the same intonational morpheme, written as X↓ by Rossi 1999:73-75.

56


Figure 6. Left: a high-rising tune (‘late peak’) at the end of the first contour (le petit gamin) indicates a degree of semantic independence between the two words. Middle : a high-falling tune (‘early peak’) at the end of the first word indicates a degree of dependency. Right: a falling pattern indicates semantic dependency of the first word relative to the second. An initial jump may or may not be realised on the second word. If it is realised (as is here the case on craintif), it increases the perceptual distance between the two words; an adjective that comes after the noun it determines tends to be realised with an initial jump. (After Vaissière 2002.)

It seems, however, that the syntactic and pragmatic components of intonation as actualised by F0 and durational variations do not always combine into a single, well-groomed ‘phonological’ structure. 2.4. The interplay of syntax, rhythm, and speaking style The eurhythmic tendencies may in some cases prevail over syntax. The statement made in the previous section, that division into intonational components can be predicted from the syntax, is somewhat of an oversimplification. In early synthesis experiments at IBM France, two types of information were actually used: the syntactic bracketing of the sentence was supplemented by an indication of the number of syllables corresponding to each node in the structure. The need for the latter information clearly indicates the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between prosody and syntax: it originates in part in the rhythmic tendency to build prosodic units of roughly equivalent length (Gee and Grosjean 1983), and with a repetition of the same F0 contour, stretched over words of different lengths. For instance, the major prosodic boundary (to use Delattre’s term) tends to occur in-between the subject Noun Phrase and the Verb Phrase (at least in isolated sentences), but may be deferred until after the verb if the subject NP is short. Some choices differ across speakers. Besides, given one syntactic phrasing and eurhythmic tendencies, intonational phrasing is to some extent left to the speaker’s appreciation: a sentence may be realised at a go, without a clear division into melodic phrases by a continuation rise 3 , only 3

The continuation rise is an intonational morpheme (to use Rossi’s phrase: see Rossi 1999) that marks a boundary.


57

subdividing the sequence of words into a series of equivalent prosodic phrases (the so-called parallel structure, Vaissière 1975). The more familiar a speaker is with a phrase, the lower the probability that (s)he will place an intonational boundary mid-way through the phrase: recordings of the phrase “l’Institut de Technologie du Massachusetts” reveal that readers who have some familiarity with the notion at issue hardly place any boundary within the group, whereas others divide it into up to three prosodic words. A speaker may freely choose among several rhythmic strategies: smoothing entire breath groups (which often goes hand in hand with a high speaking rate), separating individual prosodic phrases, or even bringing out sharply the division into individual prosodic words (in hyper-articulated, slow-rate elocution). Style plays an important role. In public addresses (typically by journalists, politicians and teachers), initial accentuation is extremely frequent (…le PREsident de la REpublique…): it appears to be no other than the generalisation of emphatic stress, with the effect of conveying speaker involvement. Though originally a stylistic and not a syntactic intonational phenomenon, this emphatic stress, as it becomes almost systematic at the beginning of an intonational group, takes on some of the functional load of intonational phrasing, a striking instance of the interplay between syntactic and pragmatic intonation (see Lucci 1979). This also results in exceptions to the general principle according to which grammatical words are prosodically weak: the above example can just as well be realised as LE président DE la république, which is, if anything, still more emphatic. Emphatic stress may in fact be aligned with either the first or last syllable of disyllabic words (“Je vais a PAris, pas à Londres”, just as well as “Je vais à PaRIS, pas à Londres”). Lastly, speaking rate also influences phrasing: the faster the rate, the more likely it is that the speaker will overlook the fine detail and bunch up several units together, resulting in groupings of 7 or 8 syllables, whereas in careful, deliberate speech, prosodic word boundaries are found every 3rd or 4th syllable (Vaissière 1971). As the rate of speech increases, a unit at one level may be progressively merged with a neighbouring (following) similar unit, the two being united by the melody into one larger unit. Figure 7 shows three realisations of the phrase “Le président directeur général” (“the CEO”).

58


Fo

fast

End of lexical word Beginning of lexical word Middle of lexical word Grammatical word

mid slow

time

Le pré si dent di rec teur gé né ral

(“the C.E.O.”)

Figure 7. A schematic illustration of the influence of speaking rate on the division of the breath group into prosodic words (after Vaissière 1997)

Note that the term ‘major’ (as well as ‘minor’) is best adapted for the use of prosody in automatic speech recognition, when the rate of speech varies: the major rise, although sometimes reduced to a single peak on a word-final syllable, can still be detected as the major boundary, by comparison with what happens on the final syllables of the other words. Note that in very rapid and excited speech, the physiological constraints take over: the speaker only breathes in when actually out of breath. 3. The debate over the transcription of intonation 3.1. French and English: a different perspective on prosodic parameters Approximating a sentence’s prosody by means of its fundamental frequency alone yields reasonably acceptable results in English because, in this particular language, duration and intensity tend to be strongly correlated with F0: all three (F0 excursions, lengthening and increase in intensity) tend to cluster on one and the same syllable—the most prominent syllable within an accentual phrase (Palmer 1922). By contrast, in French, there are (at least) two positions within a polysyllabic word that have a potential for hosting an intonational morpheme: the beginning of the word may receive emphatic stress (a morpheme of intonational intensification), which typically manifests itself phonetically by an articulatory strengthening of the consonant (resulting in an increase in the consonant-to-vowel length ratio) and an increase in subglottal pressure, among other correlates (Carton, Hirst et al. 1976, Fónagy 2001); the last syllable is where an intonational morpheme that marks continuation may be realised; it typically manifests itself by lengthening, an F0 excursion, and a decrease in intensity, or at least no increase (Delattre 1938). To sum up, the complexity of the phenomena at issue is a formidable challenge.


59

3.2. A model of intonation as superposition Experiments in speech engineering tend to support models of intonation as superposition. These models (which go back at least to Öhman 1967 and Fujisaki and Nagashima 1969) are referred to as “Contour Interaction models” by Ladd 1992, a somewhat restrictive term, since the emphasis of superpositional models is in fact not so much on the primitives of intonational description (contours vs. level tones) as on the recognition of the interplay of several levels of structure and the use of global and semi-global components, superimposed onto local ones. In using prosodic information for speech recognition, the degree of juncture between successive syllables is computed relative to the sum of junctures observed over the whole sentence; there is no fixed number of levels from the point of view of production—a standpoint which makes sense from a perceptual point of view, since it is known that listeners can go by fine details in their perception of boundaries (see Lehiste 1979). The effects of prosodic groupings are not simply local. Sentence-finality affects (at least) the last two phonological words. The closeness of the link between successive words is to be estimated relatively to the realisation of broader constituents and to the speaker’s habits. 4. Conclusion The research community has now been made aware of the many functions of intonation (Fónagy, this volume). As Rossi 1999:9 points out, the issues of the relation of intonation and syntax, on the one hand, and intonation and pragmatics, on the other, have often been addressed, whereas interactions between syntax and pragmatics have received little attention. At present, most studies (including the present one) tackle only two or three factors, such as phrasing and sentence mode, or phrasing and contrastive accent and describe a limited number of observed regularites. An increasing number of distinctive prosodic patterns (at the pragmatic level, and the expressive level) come to light, for French as well as for other languages (witness the abundance of papers about prosody in Phonetica and Journal of Phonetics, at the International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences and at the biannual Speech Prosody conferences); how they cohere together, and to what extent they make up a system, is not yet fully known. Towards a typological overview: In view of the prominent role of intonational-syntactic boundaries in French, it is tempting to place this language in a typological category of boundary languages, as opposed to stress languages such as English (a suggestion put forward by Vaissière 2002). French is by no means exceptional in this respect: numerous languages (though admittedly less studied, e.g. Newar, a language of Nepal)

60


are likewise non-tone, non-stress languages. However, the name ‘boundary language’ is misleading, in that all known languages (as far as we know), whatever their accentual system, have demarcative intonation, and are thus entitled to being called “boundary languages”; much as the opposition between “tone languages” and “intonation languages” is flawed, in that all languages, including tone languages, possess intonation (as is known since Chao Yuen-ren 1933 for Chinese, for instance). It therefore seems advisable to provide a negative typological characterisation of French, as a non-tone, non-stress language. It has been speculated that French is currently undergoing a major change in its prosodic system (Fónagy 1980); in the present state of the language, due to its flexibility, it lends itself to a host of complex, to some extent speaker-specific strategies (Fónagy 1982). In the 1970s, the project to achieve speaker-independent, rate-independent recognition of prosody in French ran up against the evidence of the variety of individual strategies: some speakers favour syntactic phrasing, others go mainly by pragmatic intonation, others tend to build units that have a roughly equal number of syllables, yet others favour a small set of contours which they tend to reproduce, sometimes as an alternation of rises and falls. This, however, does not detract from the regularity of syntactic intonation when considered in isolation. As synthesis by concatenation reaches its limits in terms of naturalness, specialists are again facing fundamental issues, and wish to feed more phonetic/linguistic knowledge into synthesis systems; this state of affairs may foster a growing interest in superpositional accounts of prosody. References Armstrong, L. and I.C. Ward. 1926. Handbook of English Intonation. Cambridge: Heffner. Bacri, N. and M.-H. Banel. 1993. “Rhythmic patterns and lexical parsing in French.” Proceedings of ESCA Workshop on Prosody, Prosody-1993, 120-123. Bolinger, D.L.M. 1978. “Intonation across languages.” Universals of Human Language, vol. 2: Phonology, ed. by J.H. Greenberg, 471-524. Stanford: Standford University Press. Carton, F., D. Hirst, A. Marchal and A. Séguinot, eds. 1976. L’accent d’insistance. Studia Phonetica 12. Montréal: Didier. Chao Yuen-ren. 1933. “Tone and intonation in Chinese.” Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 4:3.121-134. Coustenoble, H. and L. Armstrong. 1937. Studies in French intonation. Cambridge: Heffer. Delattre, P. 1938. “L’accent final en français: accent d’intensité, accent de


61

hauteur, accent de durée.” The French Review 12:2.141-145. Delattre, P. 1965. Comparing the phonetic features of English, French, German and Spanish: An interim report. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag. Delattre, P. 1966. Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics. The Hague/London: Mouton and co. Di Cristo, A. 1998. “Intonation in French.” Intonation systems: a survey of twenty languages, ed. by D. Hirst and A. Di Cristo, 195-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duez, D. and Y. Nishinuma. 1985. “Le rythme en français: alternance des durées syllabiques.” Travaux de l’Institut de Phonétique d’Aix-en-Provence, vol. 10, 151-169. Fónagy, I. 1980. “L’accent français, accent probabilitaire: dynamique d’un changement prosodique.” L’accent en français contemporain, ed. by I. Fónagy and P. Léon: Studia Phonetica 15. Fónagy, I. 1982. “Variation et normes prosodiques.” Folia Linguistica XVI:1-4.19-39. Fónagy, I. 2001. Languages within language. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. Fougeron, C. 2001. “Articulatory properties of initial segments in several prosodic constituents in French.” Journal of Phonetics 29:2.109-135. Fujisaki, H. and S. Nagashima. 1969. “A model for the synthesis of pitch contours.” Annual Report of the Engineering Research Institute, University of Tokyo 28.53-60. Gee, J.P. and F. Grosjean. 1983. “Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal.” Cognitive Psychology 15.411-458. Gendrot, C. 2005. Aspects hiérarchiques, physiologiques et acoustiques de syllabes accentuées en français: le cas des mots monosyllabiques et de syllabes initiales et finales de mots lexicaux, Ph.D., Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. Grammont, M. 1933. Traité de phonétique. Paris: Delagrave. Gussenhoven, C. 2002. Intonation and Interpretation: Phonetics and Phonology. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002, ed. by B. Bel and I. Marlien, Aix en Provence, 47-58. Hallé, P., D. de Boysson-Bardies and M.M. Vihman. 1991. “Beginnings of prosodic organization: intonation and duration patterns of disyllables produced by Japanese and French infants.” Language and Speech 34:4.299-318. Hirst, D. and A. Di Cristo. 1998. Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladd, R. 1992. “An introduction to intonational phonology.” Papers in

62


laboratory phonology II: Gesture, segment, prosody, ed. by G. J. Docherty and R. Ladd, Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Langlais, P. 1995. Traitement de la prosodie en reconnaissance automatique de la parole. Ph. D., Université d’Avignon. Lehiste, I. 1975. “The phonetic structure of paragraphs.” Structure and Process in Speech Perception, ed. by A. Cohen and S. G. Noteboom, 195-206. Berlin: Springer. Lehiste, I. 1979. “Perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries.” Frontiers of Speech Communication Research, ed. by B. Lindblom and S. Öhman, 191-201. London: Academic Press. Lieberman, P. 1967. Intonation, Perception and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Lucci, V. 1979. “L’accent didactique.” Studia Phonetica 15.107-121. Maeda, S. 1976. A Characterization of American English Intonation. Ph. D. dissertation, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA. Martin, Ph. 1981. “Pour une théorie de l’intonation.” L’intonation, de l’acoustique à la sémantique, ed. by M. Rossi, A. Di Cristo, D. Hirst, P. Martin and Y. Yishinuma, 234-271. Paris: Klincksieck. Monnin, P. and F. Grosjean. 1993. “Les structures de performance en français: caractérisation et prédiction.” L’Année Psychologique 93.9-30. Nasri, M.K. 1992. L’architecture du système de reconnaissance automatique de la parole DIRA. Thèse de Docteur ingénieur, Université de Grenoble. Öhman, S. 1967. Word and sentence intonation: a quantitative model. Stockholm: Speech Transmission Laboratory Quarterly Progress and Status Report, KTH, 2-3. 20-54. Palmer, H.E. 1922. English Intonation, with Systematic Exercises. Cambridge: Heffer. Pierrehumbert, J. 1979. “The perception of fundamental frequency declination.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 66.363-369. Rossi, M. 1967. “L’accent, le mot et ses limites.” Nouvelles perspectives en phonétique, ed. by B. Malmberg, D. B. Fry and R. Lancia, 81-85. Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles. Rossi, M. 1999. L’intonation, le système du français: description et modélisation. Gap/Paris: Ophrys. Selkirk, E. 1972. The phrase phonology of English and French. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT. Selkirk, E. 2000. “The interaction of constraints on prosodic phrasing.” Prosody: Theory and Experiment, ed. by M. Horne, 231-261. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Thorsen, N. 1980. “A study of the perception of sentence intonation: Evidence from Danish.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America


63

67.1014-1030. Vaissière, J. 1971. Contribution à la synthèse par règles du français. Ph. D., Université de Grenoble. Vaissière, J. 1975. “Further note on French prosody.” Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Quarterly Progress Report 115.251-262. Vaissière, J. 1976. Quelques analyses perceptives en français. Proceedings of VIIIe Journées d’Etudes sur la Parole, Aix-en-Provence, 193-208. Vaissière, J. 1983. “Language-independent prosodic features.” Prosody: Models and Measurements, ed. by A. Cutler and R. Ladd, 53-66. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Vaissière, J. 1986. “Variance and Invariance at the Word Level.” Invariance and Variability in Speech Process, ed. by J. S. Perkell and D. Klatt, 534-539. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Vaissière, J. 1988. “The use of prosodic parameters in automatic speech recognition.” Recent advances in speech understanding and dialog systems, Berlin: Springer. Vaissière, J. 1995. “Phonetic explanations for cross-linguistic similarities.” Phonetica 52.123-130. Vaissière, J. 1997. “Langues, prosodie et syntaxe.” Traitement Automatique des Langues 38:1. Vaissière, J. 2002. “Cross-linguistic prosodic transcription: French vs. English.” Problems and methods of experimental phonetics. In honour of the 70th anniversary of Pr. L.V. Bondarko, ed. by N. B. Volskaya, N. D. Svetozarova and P. A. Skrelin, Moscow.

A Predictive Approach to the Analysis of Intonation in Discourse in French Piet MERTENS 1. Introduction We propose an approach for analysing the role of intonation in discourse. It aims to make explicit the contribution of intonation to the structuring of information and to the expression of the speaker’s attitude towards both the information content and the communication context. The role of intonation in discourse is of interest to many linguistic domains, including the study of prosody (e.g. Rossi 1999, Di Cristo et al. 2004), discourse analysis (e.g. Roulet et al. 1985, Simon 2003), and the study of information structure (Lambrecht 1994, 2001). Analysis is frequently based upon an interpretation of the meaning of the interaction. Certain discourse analysis models for French start by segmenting the speech chain into minimal discourse units, then establish a hierarchical organisation of these units based on the semantic, logical or pragmatic relations between them. Only then are the ways examined in which intonation contributes to this segmentation and structuring of discourse. Information structure analysis, based on K. Lambrecht’s approach, goes a long way in making semantic and pragmatic information explicit. Such analysis makes use of notions including presupposition, assertion, aboutness, « mémoire discursive », topic, and focus. These refer to facts which cannot be observed directly, and assume the presence and activation of information and knowledge in the mental representation of the speakers. The interpretative nature of such an analysis raises some methodological questions. As the meaning of an utterance is based simultaneously on several aspects, which include lexical information, morphological elements, syntactic construction and pragmatic context, how the semantics of prosodic forms is interpreted is critical, especially with regard to establishing objectivity. The analysis proposed here aims at reducing the amount of interpretation by the linguist and at making verifiable and reproducible statements about the contributions of prosody to syntactic structure and to the organisation of information in discourse. This procedure exploits empirical properties of spoken language, either syntactic or prosodic, as well as the relationship between both aspects and their synchronisation.

66

Piet MERTENS

At the syntactic level the speech chain is organised into local dependency networks (defined below). The very nature of dependency relations assigns to each dependent a particular type, acting either as a valency argument, a peripheral complement or an adjunct. In turn, these autonomous dependency networks may be embedded in larger syntactic or prosodic constructions, as with dislocation, cleft, pseudo-cleft, by a general mechanism of prosodic grouping, by register changes, and so forth. It is possible to calculate the unmarked prosodic properties of such networks and constructions. This procedure identifies syllables with word stress, delimits prosodic units and assigns them prosodic boundaries of relative strength. This results in a prediction of unmarked prosody, which will be read alongside the actual, pronounced prosody. Each element by which the actual prosody differs from the predicted form acquires a marked status and as such introduces prosodic meaning. Some prosodic forms make the informational status of an utterance part explicit, while others may fulfil a pragmatic, emotional or additional function. The structure of this article follows the analysis stages. First (§2) the descriptive framework used in syntactic analysis is briefly presented. Then (§3) the representation of prosodic forms and their semantics is discussed. The next section (§4) examines the relations between the prosodic and syntactic levels. Finally (§5) these elements are combined in a procedure for discourse analysis based on the prediction of default intonation from syntactic information. 2. The descriptive framework for syntactic analysis For syntactic analysis, we adopt the framework of dependency grammar proposed by L. Tesnière (1959), refined with concepts from valency grammar, in particular from the pronominal approach (Eynde et al. 1978, Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1984, Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1990, Eynde & Mertens 2003). The choice of this framework is no coincidence, as the combination of dependency relations and valency allows for a simple and concise formulation of rules on the interfacing of syntax and prosody, whereas a conventional approach based upon constituency would require more complex rules and in some cases would be inadequate. In dependency grammar, syntactic structure is seen as a network of dependency relations between words. This network results from elementary relations between word pairs, called connections. A connection (Tesnière’s connexion) is an asymmetrical relation between two elements: a head and a dependent. The linguistic debate about the notion of the head is not engaged, as dependency relations may be defined without it. Whereas a head may have several dependents, each dependent has only one head. A dependent

A Predictive Approach to the Analysis

67

that is governed by a head may in turn govern other elements. This results in a network in which all elements are either directly or indirectly connected. Each network contains a root; it is the single element in the network that does not depend upon another element. rencontre

collègue

Christine

un

bon

italien

très

The structural order of an utterance corresponds to the network of hierarchical relations between its elements, and the linear order to the sequence of these elements in the speech chain or in writing. The representation above (Tesnière’s stemma) indicates the structural order of an utterance: each edge indicates a connection and the vertical position of the connected elements designates their hierarchical relation, the head being placed above its dependents. In the stemma, linear order is not necessarily respected. As intonation is inseparable from linear order, an alternative but equivalent representation is used in which connections and their orientation are indicated by arrows.

Christine rencontre un très bon collègue italien

A dependency cluster (Tesnière’s nœud) corresponds to the network formed by a head along with all (directly or indirectly) dependent elements. A cluster may contain embedded clusters. Clusters may be classified into verbal, nominal, adjectival and adverbial clusters according to the part of speech of their head. Dependency relations cannot be freely exchanged. The relation between a verb and a pronominal dependent differs from that between a noun and its adjectival determiner: it is impossible to swap both dependents. Moreover, verb dependents are non-interchangeable in most cases: « Peter observes the movement », but « * The movement observes Peter ». As a result the type

68

Piet MERTENS

and nature of dependency relations should be specified. Tesnière distinguishes two major classes of verbal dependents: actants (valency complements) and circonstants (peripheral complements), as well as three subtypes for the former. However his classification is based on semantic rather than syntactic considerations. Below a more detailed classification of verbal complements is given. Obviously, the dependency relation does not cover the full range of syntactic relations. Tesnière provides a general syntactic mechanism of type casting which he calls translation, which enables a form (word), called the translative (translatif), to combine with a cluster of a given type in order to form a cluster of another type. For instance in « le maire de Paris », the preposition « de » allows the noun « Paris » to form a cluster « de Paris » that behaves like an adjective, similar to « le maire parisien ». livre le de Pierre

Tesnière treats the following categories as translatives: prepositions, auxiliaries, relative pronouns and certain conjunctions. This casting mechanism is also applied to certain derivational morphemes, such as the infinitive marker. a

I donnés

Jean

les

donne

Jean

le

O à Pierre

regardais

regardais je

personne

lui la

A qui dansait

je

O vals- -er danseurs

les

The description of the relation bewteen syntax and prosody requires further extensions to the apparatus for syntactic analysis. We will firstly consider the typology of complements, then the nature of valency complements, followed by the notion of syntactic construction. Among the dependency relations headed by a full verb, and the corresponding complements, several types may be distinguished, namely, valency arguments, peripheral complements and adjuncts. Valency arguments (compléments essentiels, Tesnière’s actants) are largely mandatory and vary from one verb to the next (« il observe le mouvement », « *il observe au mouvement »), and even from one verb sense


69

to the next (« il affecte une grande détresse », « on affectera cette somme au ravalement », « son départ l’a beaucoup affecté »). Together, the arguments specific to a given verb use constitute the subcategorisation frame. A verb is saturated when all its valency arguments are present in the linear form (i.e. in the cluster dependent on that verb). Peripheral complements may be used with all full verbs and are always optional (« le matin, dans son atelier, il travaille méticuleusement »). The pronominal approach proposes a typology of verbal dependents in French, based on the proportionality relation between a lexicalized constituent and a pronoun. For an introduction, cf. Eynde et al. 2002, Eynde & Mertens 2003. The term adjunct (adjonction, adjoint) will be used to designate a verbal complement lacking a relation with a proportional pronoun. décidément, en voilà un bel exemple je ne le pense pas je suis d’un autre avis, comme tu sais avec ça, je me demande comment on va faire puisque tu insistes, il prendra le train suivant

The term verb kernel will be used to indicate a sequence in which the syntactic structure corresponds to a saturated verb cluster consisting of the verbal head and all required valency arguments, possibly one or more optional ones, peripheral complements, but no adjuncts. When the root is a finite verb form, the cluster will be called a finite verb kernel. The term (verb) construction will be used here to designate a sequence of elements, with saturated valency, in which each part can be identified on the basis of its syntactic or prosodic properties, or on the basis of its lexical identity (e.g. « ce » in « c’est lui qui y a pensé »). Main examples of syntactic properties of the construction parts include the root status of the verb, the syntactic function of the dependents (i.e. the nature of the dependency relation between the head and the dependent), a coreference relation. The following table enumerates some constructions in which the prosodic properties will be analyzed in detail below. Terms used in the pronominal approach1 and widely used terminology will both be employed. The abovementioned constructions can be found for almost all full verbs. The list of construction is not intended to be exhaustive. The unmarked construction (dispositif direct) consists of a verb kernel with unmarked word order, i.e. where word order is predictable on the basis 1

Blanche-Benveniste et al. (1984 : 37, 144ss), Blanche-Benveniste et al. (1990 : 55-66)

70

Piet MERTENS

of the clitic or lexical nature of the forms, cf. Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1984: 145. Dispositif direct Double marquage à gauche Double marquage à droite Dispositif d’extraction

Il jette les livres Les livres, il les jette. Elle lui profite, cette attitude. C’est les livres qu’il jette. C’est à lui que cette attitude profite Pseudo-clivée Pseudo-cleft Ce qu’il jette, ce sont les livres Dispositif de binarisation Dislocation A lui cette attitude profite Presentational construction Il y a Pierre qui jette les livres. Restrictive construction Il n’y a qu’à lui que cette attitude profite. Combinations of constructions Les livres, c’est lui qui les jette. Left Dislocation Right Dislocation Cleft

3. The descriptive framework for prosody This section enumerates prosodic concepts required to present the approach. These concepts are simply outlined here. For a full introduction to the model used, the reader is referred to Mertens et al 2001a : §3. Additional references to publications are provided in the footnotes. 3.1. The intonation unit Most intonation models for French adopt a prosodic unit consisting of a sequence of syllables with a caracteristic pitch contour. Terminology varies substantially. The term intonation group2 (groupe intonatif, GI or IG) used here designates a sequence of one or more syllables in which the last full syllable carries final stress (defined below). In the example below, pronounced by a female speaker, the underlined syllables are stressed and the resulting segmentation into intonation units is indicated by brackets. The illustration below shows the prosodic parameters of intensity and fundamental frequency for the utterance, as well as the simulated perceived pitch (thick line), as obtained in a prosogram, cf. Mertens 2004b.

2

For a detailed definition of the « groupe intonatif », see e.g. Mertens 1987, Mertens et al 2001a :§3.3.


71

(comme dans les pages jaunes) (de l’annuaire) (en France) (catégories) (professionnelles) 65

66

67 G=0.32/T2 vnuclei

100

90

150 Hz

80

_ k m d



l e p a

dansles pages 70 c_omme



o n d l a nε

jaunes

Groult

 

de l' annuaire en

f

  France

s

œ k a t e g   i p f e s j  n ε l _ euh catégories professionnelles _ Prosogram v1.4.3

Once the intonation group is defined and can be located consistently in the speech chain, an inventory of the pitch contours accompanying such units can be made, in order to examine the relation between such units and the entities of the syntactic layer, to facilitate the interpretation of the semantics of these contours, and to observe their use and function in speech communication. The speech chain can then be analyzed as a sequence of intonation units involving a linguistic code. 3.2. Two stress types Our definition of the GI is based upon prosodic stress. However, locating the stressed syllables is not without difficulty. Stress remains an inevitable ingredient for almost all phonological models of prosody. Indeed, the communicative status of a pitch form, e.g. a pitch rise or a high level tone, varies according to whether or not that form appears on a stressed syllable. Stress is an essential concept, because it constitutes the anchor point for the alignment between the syllabic chain and pitch contours. If intonation were reduced to a sequence of pitch movements, it would still be necessary to position such movements on the linear chain, which can only be done on the basis of stress. In the case of French, the issue of stress is complicated further by the fact that there are two types of stress in the language: final stress (accent final, AF) and initial stress (accent initial, AI). They need to be distinguished because only final stress entails a right hand boundary of the intonation unit. Both types of stress are distinguished by their articulatory and distributional properties3. 3.3. Pitch levels and tones There are many ways to characterize pitch variations in speech, depending on the nature of the representation. The illustration given above 3

cf. Mertens 1987, 2002.

72

Piet MERTENS

shows both the acoustic and simulated perceptual representations. In linguistic description, symbolic (either phonological or morphological) representations are used; here pitch variation is characterized rather coarsely by a sequence of discrete elements, viewed as pitch targets. In such symbolic representations, the pitch continuum is reduced to a small set of pitch levels, such that each target is on one level. Common notation systems show a large diversity as to the number of pitch levels and the location of the targets. The most widely used system has just two pitch levels, which is clearly insufficient for the description of pitch variations commonly found in spontaneous speech. In our work on French, we have adopted the system proposed by Dooren & Eynde (1982), in which pitch levels are established progressively from left to right on the basis of both local pitch intervals and the speaker’s pitch range. The low (L) and high (H) pitch levels are separated by a major melodic interval. The extra low (L-) and extra high (H+) levels correspond to the floor and the ceiling of the pitch range, respectively. The levels L and H may be raised or lowered due to the presence of a minor interval, resulting in the levels /L, /H, \L and \H. The size of the major interval is defined in a relative manner, on the basis of the pitch range in the utterance, which typically corresponds to an interval of ≥ 5 ST (semitones). The term tone is used here to indicate the pitch level associated with a syllable, or the set of pitch levels, in case of an intrasyllabic pitch glide. 3.4. Internal structure of the tone unit Speech corpora provide numerous samples of pitch contours found on intonation units. These contours mainly differ through features such as the number of syllables in the unit, the phonetic nature of the sounds in these syllables, and the presence of an initial accent. The systematic analysis if such contours reveals an underlying internal structure, in which the syllable carrying final stress (AF) occupies a central position, given its obligatory character in the intonation group. Some intonation groups contain only this final stressed syllable (« oui ! », « où ? », « là ! »). In others it is preceeded by an unstressed syllable (« ici », « elle vient ») or by several (« il arrive », « on en reprend »). This results in two parts: the stressed syllable and the preceeding sequence of unstressed syllables. In intonation groups also containing an initial stress (« c’est inacceptable »), the internal structure consists of up to four parts: leading unstressed series (unstr), initial stress (AI), unstressed series, final stress (AF). The structural representation below resumes all forms into a single structural pattern, with optional parts indicated between parentheses. GI = ((unstr) (AI)) (unstr) AF


73

The internal organisation of the intonation group is suggested not only by the presence of the stresses, but also by the observation that pitch contours found for complete groups can be viewed as concatenations of pitch forms found in each of their component parts. In the illustration below, contours 1A to 1D are identical to the exception of the pitch movement of the final stressed syllable. In contrast, contours 1A, 2A and 3A share the contour for their final stress, but differ elsewhere in the intonation unit.

Given the internal structure of the GI and the notion of tone, a contour can be analysed componentially, as a sequence of tones. 3.5. The appendix In the following utterances, the final part of the utterance (« en quelque sorte », « les autres ») will be pronounced with a flat pitch contour on an extra-low pitch level, without stress, and with decreased intensity. This contour will be referred to as the appendix contour. Note that the appendix is found only after certain final tones. et c’est comme ça que l’histoire marche en quelque sorte (R. Barthes) j’aime bien comprendre comment ça marche les autres (F. Giroud)

The lack of a stressed syllable in such sequences makes segmentation into GI units problematic. This can be solved if the appendix is either considered to be a special type of intonation group (GI), or as an optional part of the GI, following the final stress (AF). Both analyses present certain advantages, but as the appendix never appears alone, without a preceeding

74

Piet MERTENS

GI, we have opted for the second analysis. As a result, the structural pattern of the GI is modified as follows: GI = ((unstr) (AI)) (unstr) AF (appendix)

Table 1 shows the tone inventory for all positions in the intonation group. unstr l h

l h

AI H L

unstr l h

l h

AF L-LH+H+ HLH/H /HH \HH HL LH HH /LL LL \LL

appendix l-...l-

h...h

Table 1. Distribution of tones in the maximal intonation group (i.e. containing the maximum number of positions). AF = accent final, AI = accent initial, unstr = unstressed sequence. Horizontal lines indicate constraints on the combination of elements in the paradigms crossed by the line. For instance: l- tones only combine with tones L-L-, HL- and H+H+ of part AF.

3.6. Interpreting the intonation contours To describe the meaning of intonation contours, we start from the pitch form associated with the parts of the intonation group. For each of these forms, all occurrences can be collected in a speech corpus and the meaning associated with a particular form can largely be grasped by examining the meaning in the particular uses and attributing a common denominator. Considering the tones in final stress position, each final tone in French implies a boundary of a given strength. The largest boundary corresponds to a final tone ending in pitch level L- (i.e. tones L-L-, HL-, and LL-4). The presence of an L- tone results in the completion of a maximal prosodic unit, and hence in a completed information object. The tones \LL, LL, /LL, HH, 4

LL- is a variant of L-L-.


75

H/H indicate increasing boundary levels. For these tones, the boundary level increases with pitch level. Certain final tones go beyond this demarcative and organising function, informing the listener about how the speaker conceives the information in the intonation group carrying these tones. The table below provides a short description of the meaning of such tones. The suggested characterisation of intonational meaning is not discussed here, as the precise meaning attributed to these tones is irrelevant for the behaviour of the model. Initial stress is a means to mark the start of an information objet in the linear chain. This allows for a delimitation of strings of lexical elements within the domain of an intonation group, from the AI to the first following AF, or alternatively, to delimit a string exceeding the limits of a single intonation group, from the AI to the AF with a major boundary. Initial stress is particularly useful to highlight lexical elements that do not carry lexical stress and do not allow final stress. In spontaneous speech the unstressed penultimate syllable of the GI plays an important role. As it is followed by a stressed syllable, which itself carries a tone, it is not always clear to what extent the semantics of the contour should be attributed to one or the other. The table indicates the two most common combinations: « …h L-L- » and « …h \HH ». The appendix has a particular distribution; its role will be discussed below. Still other prosodic phenomena play a role, such as register changes (marking parenthesis), declinations and inclinations, used as organisational or expressive means. However, analysis of these phenomena is beyond the scope of this study.

76

Piet MERTENS tone

general meaning

connotation in context

L-

finality

assertiveness, peremptory

H/H

major continuation

HH

intermediate continuation

/LL, LL, \LL

minor continuation

HL, HL-

center of attention, focus

important or new information, involvement of speaker

LH

major continuation

invitation to listener to respond

H+H+

involvement of speaker in message

conviction, important information

AI

start of object

stress on object

...h L-L-

evident to speaker

assertiveness, peremptory

...h \HH

evident to listeners

common wisdom

appendix

background information

accessory information

Table 2. Characterisation of the general meaning of individual tones and their connotations in context.

To sum up, intonation contours convey various types of information, of a demarcative, organising, pragmatic, and communicative nature, which is expressed by the tones at specific locations in the contour. The resulting meaning is obtained compositionnally by combining the contributions of the contour parts, i.e. of the tones of the syllables. 3.7. Prosodic grouping Intonation can disambiguate strings which would otherwise be ambiguous. In some cases this is related to alternative segmentations into intonation groups (a, b), in others to the constitution of larger blocks due to the relative strength of prosodic boundaries (c, d). This in fact results from a general mechanism of prosodic grouping.

A Predictive Approach to the Analysis (a) (b) (c) (d)

77

(soixante dix-sept) (quatre-vingt) (treize) (zéro zéro) (dix-huit) (soixante) (dix-sept) (quatre-vingt treize) (zéro zéro) (dix-huit) (le bébéHH) (il dortL-L-) (avec sa mèreHH) (ça va très bienL-L-) (le bébéHH) (il dort/LL) (avec sa mèreL-L-) (ça va très bienL-L-)

Each contour of an intonation group implies a prosodic boundary, given by the final tone. With the exception of the maximal boundary, associated with the L- tone, boundaries are proportional to the pitch level at the pitch peak within the final stressed syllable: the higher the pitch, the stronger the boundary. The sequence of intonation groups with their respective boundaries gives rise to both their hierarchical organisation, and their articulation in prosodic constituents. The principle of prosodic grouping is very simple. When a boundary is followed by a stronger one, their intonation groups merge into a larger unit, while preserving the internal hierarchy, resulting in a prosodic package (paquet intonatif). For a sequence of two boundaries of equal strength or when the first is the stronger, no package is formed; both units simply remain independent. To obtain the organisation of prosodic packages for a given sequence of intonation groups, the basic principle is applied to each pair of successive groups, starting with the first and shifting to the next group after each application.

The example5 above contains four intonations groups, indicated between brackets. The boundary of the first group is weaker than that of the next, hence both groups form a package, as indicated by the parentheses. Next, we compare the boundaries of groups 2 and 3, which illustrates the opposite situation: strong boundary followed by weak boundary, hence juxtaposition. Groups 3 and 4 show another case of inclusion. Moreover, since tone L-Lcorresponds to the maximal boundary, a second order package is obtained, incorporating the two packages already found: « l’institut de phonétique » and « de l’université de Bruxelles ». It is significant to consider in how far this kind of grouping is based on the final tones or on other information, such as syntactic structure or meaning. To answer this question, a small experiment is undertaken in which the tones of groups 1 and 2 are exchanged: the first receives tone HH, the second tone /LL. When pronounced, this results in an utterance that is illformed, in spite of the fact that the syntactic structure and semantics remain 5

In this example, the low (L) pitch level is noted as B, and L- is noted as B-.

78

Piet MERTENS

unchanged.

Prosodic grouping is evidently a crucial phenomenon: it allows the analysis of relations between prosodic and syntactic structure. Until this point our research was limited to the analysis and classification of observed intonations. In what follows the focus shifts to the possible intonations for a given linear sequence, and to the question whether or not they are well formed in the language. 3.8. The stress group A word sequence may be pronounced in several ways, by varying the number of final stresses and hence the number of intonation groups. In the example below, utterance (b) has more groups than (a), as indicated by the brackets. In order to account for the observed variants, we postulate an intermediate level of representation between the GI and the words, consisting of stress groups (SG, or groupes accentuels, GA), which are predictable. In forms (a, b), each intonation groups includes one or more stress groups. (a) (b)

[nous avons visité] [son nouvel appartement] [nous avons][visité] [son nouvel][appartement]

The rule for stress group formation refers to the presence or absence of lexical stress. Clitics are words without lexical stress, whereas non-clitics carry lexical stress on a given syllable. The list of parts of speech for both word classes will be given below. Stress group formation rule6. Each non-clitic element constitutes the centre of a stress group. Clitic elements are incorporated in the stress group of the non-clitic element they syntactically depend upon. However, when a clitic is separated from its head by a non-clitic, that clitic is incorporated in the stress group it precedes: in “ce magnifique bateau”, clitic “ce” forms a stress group with “magnifique”. The prosodic skeleton of an utterance represents the relations between the segmental and prosodic layers. For each syllable it indicates whether it can carry a final tone. On the tier labelled AL (for “accent lexical”, word stress) a small circle represents the final full syllable of a non-clitic. On the tier labelled GA, each syllable is indicated by a dash, when it can carry stress, 6

For furher detail, see Mertens 1993: 30-40, 1997: 34-5.


79

or otherwise by a dot. The parentheses indicate the boundaries of the resulting stress groups. (nous) (on y cherchait) (un nouvel) (appartement) AL ( o (. . . o (. . o ( . . . o GA ( - ) (. . . - ) (. . - ) ( . . . - )

Clitic elements (such as clitic pronouns and determiners) merge with the stress group to the side of their head, which is either to the right, or to the left: (lui avait-elle) (envoyé) (cette lettre) AL ( . . o . (. . o ( . o GA ( . . . ) (. . -) ( . )

The final stress falls on the last full syllable of the intonation group. When this last syllable belongs to a clitic element (for instance a clitic pronoun, as in “avait-elle”), then it is this clitic that carries the stress7. Stressed syllables are indicated by a plus sign in the tier labelled GI.

AL GA GI GI

(lui ( . ( . ( . ( .

avait-elle) . o . . . ) . . + ) . . -

(envoyé) (cette lettre ) (. . o ( . o (. . -) ( . ) (. . +) ( . + ) . . +) ( . + )

An intonation group (GI) consists of one or more stress groups (GA), but the way in which the latter are grouped depends upon several factors. For instance, adjacent final stresses (or stress clash) are avoided8. The possible groupings also depend on the syntactic relations between the stress groups (cf. infra). Sometimes a speaker forms a rather long intonation group to present the sequence as a single information object9. Other factors, that have little to do with information, play a role as well such as speech rate or speech type (read vs spontaneous speech). 3.9. Word stress and part of speech categories The clitic nature of an element depends both on its position in the 7 8 9

There is an exception: clitic “je” never carries final stress, even when following its verbal head. cf. Mertens 1992 cf. Mertens 1987: 111, 1993: 49-50.

80

Piet MERTENS

syntactic construction and its part of speech: « nous » is non-clitic in « nous, on le leur demandera » and clitic in « nous le leur demanderons ». Except for syntactically marked positions that require non-clitic forms, as described below, the following rules can be applied. The following categories are non-clitic elements in French: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs (except for the particle “ne”), numerals and “mots-phrases” 10 . Pronouns behave differently according to their minor category. Some personal pronouns are always clitic: “je, tu, il, ils, on, le, la, les, me, te, se...”; whereas others, like “moi, toi, eux...”, are non-clitic. A small number of personal pronouns, “nous, vous, elle, elles, lui, leur”, are clitically ambiguous: in fact they are homonymous pairs, one belonging to a clitic paradigm, the other to a non-clitic paradigm. All other pronouns are non-clitic: indefinites, interrogatives and relative pronouns (except “que”), and demonstratives (“ceux-ci, celles-là...”, except “ce, c’”). Determiners are clitic, except indefinites (“certains enfants”) and predeterminers (“tous mes livres”). Prepositions and conjunctions function as clitics in most cases. Compound prepositions (“à la suite de”) and compound conjunctions (“à condition que”) function as sequences of elements each of which is potentially clitic depending upon its part of speech11. 4. Intonation and syntax 4.1. Agreement between intonation and syntax Two elements in a dependency relation are connected. In « cet étudiant nous étonne beaucoup », the pairs of connected elements are « cet + étudiant », « nous + étonne », « étudiant + étonne » and « étonne + beaucoup ». In intonation analysis, significant dependency relations are those between adjacent stress groups, as found in the prosodic skeleton of the linear form. In French, prosodic organisation relies on the strength of the boundaries carried by the tones in final stress position, and stress groups are the smallest units that can carry final stress and as such can participate in prosodic structuring. Two stress groups are connected if their respective heads connect. In the following example, the pairs of adjacent connected stress groups are « cet étudiant + nous étonne » and « nous étonne + beaucoup ». In general, as with stress groups, two objects are connected if their local heads are connected. 10

11

A term used by Tesnière 1959: 94-96. These are elements that do not depend on others and that form an independent utterance, e.g. “non, bonjour, salut, parbleu, soit, allez, voyons...”. In “à condition que tu partes”, stress falls on the syllable “tion” rather than on the syllable “que”. In contrast with clitic pronouns, final prepositions and conjunctions that are part of a prepositional or conjunction compound are not integrated in the GA they precede.


Cet étudiant

nous étonne

81

beaucoup

A verb kernel may be pronounced in several ways, by varying intonation. However these intonations are well formed only if they respect certain constraints made explicit in the prosodic skeleton. Stress position is constrained: only syllables in final position of a stress group can carry a final stress (AF) and only the start (initial or second syllable) of lexical element can carry initial stress (AI). The utterance « ce livre médiocre se vend rarement » contains four stress groups. It can be pronounced in four, three, or two intonation groups. So, certain prosodic variants of the same string differ by the number of final stresses. This type of variation can be described as the merger of two or more stress groups into a single intonation group. In (a), each stress group is realized as an independent intonation group; in (b), the first two stress groups are merged into a single intonation group. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

(ce livre) (médiocre) (se vend) (rarement) (ce livre médiocre) (se vend) (rarement) (ce livre) (médiocre) (se vend rarement) (ce livre médiocre) (se vend rarement) *(ce livre) (médiocre se vend) (rarement) ?(ce livre médiocre se vend rarement)

However (e), with groups 2 and 3 merged, is not well-formed. The explanation lies in the presence or absence of a dependency relation. Whereas in examples (a) to (d), the parts that are grouped together, are also connected, this is not the case for (e).

(ce livre) (médiocre) (se vend) (rarement)

This is captured by the rule below. (MCSG) Merger of connected stress groups: Only stress groups that are connected may be merged into one intonation group. Variant (f) is unnatural, although the MCSG constraint is respected. This is explained by the length of the linear chain: an intonation group of six syllables is exceptional, although not impossible. The following examples all consist of two stress groups. The common pronunciation as two intonation groups, exemplified in the first two items,

82

Piet MERTENS

would be strange for the third, because it would result in two adjacent syllables carrying a stress of type AF. (a) (b) (c) (d)

(il habitait) (dans un appartement) (il habitait) (ailleurs) (il habitait là) ? (il habitait) (là)

We formulated the following rule. (SMSG) Spontaneous merger of stress groups: If the second of two connected stress groups is monosyllabic, they are normally merged into one intonation group. The above constraints involve the possibility for a stress group to become stressed. The following paragraph examines constraints on the selection of tones used in stressed position. Prosodic grouping results from the tones in final stress position and more particularly from the boundary levels of these tones. Example (a) below has a well-formed intonation; the sequence of the final tones /LL and HH results in the grouping of the first two GIs into one single package; then, the sequence HH L-L- creates a second package that includes the first one. In contrast, example (b) results in a prosodic grouping that sounds wrong. (a) (b)

{((on enverra/LL) (le messageHH)) (aux abonnésL-L-)} *{(on enverraHH) ((le message/LL) (aux abonnésL-L-))}

on enverra le message aux abonnés

Let’s examine the dependency relations between the intonation groups in this utterance, i.e. between the basic units of prosodic organisation. The second and third groups correspond respectively to the direct and indirect object; hence they are dependents of the verb, i.e. of the first group. In (a) prosodic grouping links connected elements: verb and object, in the first package, and verb and indirect object in the larger package. In (b), however, the same mechanism results in the grouping of two unconnected dependents (direct object and indirect object). A systematic analysis of combinations of intonation group contours, the dependency relations at play and the grammaticality of the resulting utterances, leads to the following generalization: (PGCE) Prosodic grouping of connected elements: Within a dependency cluster, only connected parts may be grouped by intonation.


83

This rule predicts for instance that in « j’ai divisé en catégories ces comportements étranges », the prosodic boundary after « en catégories » should be stronger than that following « j’ai divisé ». Similarly, in « il publie souvent des livres », the adverb will be grouped with the verb, rather than with the object. Given two prosodic boundaries A and B, the notation « A < B » will indicate that the boundary level of A should be lower than that of B; the interpretation of « > », « ≤ » and « ≥ » is analoguous. GA [ (j'ai) (divisé) (en catégories) (ces comportements) (étranges)] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) /LL < HH > /LL < L-LGA [ (il publie ) (souvent ) (des livres)] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) /LL < HH ≤ L-LGA [ (il publie ) (souvent) (des auteurs ) (américains)] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) /LL < HH > /LL < L-L-

It should be stressed that this constraint only applies to intonation groups that belong to the same dependency cluster. Below, examples are provided in which two unconnected intonation units are grouped in one intonation package, but their clusters are independent. 4.2. Default intonation The few constraints above enable us to calculate the default intonation of simple syntactic constructions, consisting of a verbal, nominal or adverbial cluster. By default intonation we mean unmarked intonation. Unmarked intonation follows from the syntactic relations between the elements in the linear chain and merely reproduces these relations. It should be kept in mind that determining unmarked intonation aims at identifying objectively and explicitly marked prosodic forms in actual utterances. Therefore, this unmarked intonation is not an obligatory form, nor a “normal” one, that would be the only one possible for the syntactic structure under analysis, but rather a virtual intonation that will serve as a reference form for the analysis of the intonation used by the speaker. The default intonation only specifies final stress, as the use of initial stress constitutes a marked form by itself. First the computation of default intonation in simple constructions consisting of a single cluster is presented. Afterwhich, it will be extended to

84

Piet MERTENS

complex syntactic constructions involving several adjacent clusters, or in prosodically marked constructions such as clefts. In an utterance consisting of a single (verbal, nominal, adverbial) cluster, the entire cluster receives a final stress which will be placed on the last element of the corresponding linear form, i.e. at the right boundary of the cluster (examples a, b). When the cluster contains two or more stress groups, of course it is possible to have several stresses, provided the constraints given above are met (examples c to f). (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) .

(attention) (il en apportera) (il viendra) (ce soir) (il viendra ce soir) (on enverra) (le message) (aux abonnés) (on enverra le message) (aux abonnés)

nominal cluster with 1 SG verbal cluster with 1 SG verbal cluster with 2 SG id. verbal cluster with 3 SG id

A cluster of several stress groups is usually pronounced in several intonation groups when the length of the linear form exceeds four syllables. Multiple intonation groups are obtained, the internal organisation of which will follow the constraints described above. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

un enfant qui joue // oublie le monde extérieur \\ un enfant / qui joue // oublie le monde extérieur \\ *un enfant // qui joue oublie // le monde extérieur \\ *un enfant // qui joue / oublie // le monde extérieur \\ un enfant // qui joue / avec ses jouets // oublie le monde extérieur \\

In the above examples, the symbols /, // and \\ indicate relative intonation boundaries of minor, major or terminal strength, respectively. The major boundary is introduced by tones HH, H/H or LH, the minor boundary by /LL, \LL or LL and the terminal boundary by L-L-, LL- or HL-. Example (a) illustrates the pronunciation as two intonation groups; the first IG corresponds to a nominal cluster that depends on the head of the following IG. In (b) the subject cluster appears as two IGs. Form (c) goes against constraint MCSG, since « qui joue » and « oublie » are unconnected, although they belong to the same cluster. Similarly, form (d) breaks constraint PGCE. In spite of the similarity between the intonations of (d) and (e), intonation (e) is well-formed, since constraints MCSG and PGCE are met. In such cases, where a nominal phrase is followed by a relative clause, the question of whether the intervening boundary should be marked


85

prosodically by a stress on the nominal phrase arises. This appears to be impossible to answer on the basis of constituent type alone, as the dependency network, the number of syllables and the relative strength of boundaries need to be taken into account. However, these factors apply to other types of constituents as well. In other words, constituent type is not required to predict prosodic structure. Besides lexical elements and dependency relations, syntactic structures usually include translative elements, such as prepositions, relative pronouns, auxiliairy verbs and subordinating conjunctions. Their prosodic status needs to be defined. As for clitic translatives, their prosodic behaviour is analogous to that of other clitics (clitic pronouns, articles, possessive determiners…). In the example « (la personne) (que tu vois) (était) (mon voisin) », the translative (clitic relative pronoun) « que » is integrated in the stress group of the verb « vois ». The translative’s behaviour is like that of the pronoun « tu », which also depends upon the verb. Auxiliaries are non-clitic translatives. The following examples contain the auxiliary « avait », which, as a verb, generates its own stress group. (a) (b) (c)

(la paniqueHH) (qui avait saisiHH)((qui avait/LL) /LL ||| RE \LL H H\H H H/H GA [ (cet annuaire) (de la misogynie)] GI ( ) ( ) DI /LL < ||| RE HH H/H

96

Piet MERTENS

On the whole, the predicted forms match the forms used by the speaker: as the two ADNs end in major prosodic boundaries, the relative strength of the internal boundaries is respected resulting in the predicted intonation packages. There are two exceptions: by putting an initial stress on « mâle », the speaker isolates the sequence « mâle assurance », indicating that it should be understood as a single semantic unit; in the same way the word « catégories » is made prominent. The two ADNs take a major non-terminal prosodic boundary. The speaker thus indicates that the information structure is incomplete and that additional elements are required to complete it. The information structure started here will remain open until the terminal contour on « professionnelles » is reached two ADNs later. The ADN « comme dans… » is terminated by a LH tone on « France », expressing both continuation and requesting approval. The initial stress on « comme » marks the start of the comparison and makes it prominent. The continuation on « France » and the finality after « professionnelles » creates an intonation package that covers the two ADNs linking them by prosodic means, which compensates for the absence of a syntactic link. GA [ (comme dans les pages) (jaunes) (de l'annuaire) (en France)] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) DI < HH /LL ||| RE H HH /LL LH GA [(catégories ) (professionnelles )] GI ( ) ( ) DI /LL < ||| RE HH L-LGA [(parce qu'on voit ) (qu'aucune) (n'est) (épargnée)] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) DI HH > /LL < ||| RE /LL /LL HH GA [(ni) (les poètes) (ni) (surtout) (les savants)] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) DI HH > /LL < ||| RE H LH H HH HLGA [ (alors ) (que ça devrait) (être) (objectif) euh (la science )] GI ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) DI /LL /LL ||| APP RE /LL /LL HLl-......l-


97

The subordinating conjunction « parce que » calls for a governing proposition, at least according to traditional grammar. Here, it is preceeded by a maximal prosodic boundary, indicating that it opens a new proposition or discourse unit. In spoken language « parce que », like other conjunctions, may be used independently of a governing verb cluster15. The syntactic relation between « parce qu’on voit qu’aucune n’est épargnée », on the one hand, and « ni les poètes, ni surtout les savants », on the other, is not obvious. However the two clusters are brought together by the prosodic grouping which turns it into a single maximal package. The ADN « ni les poètes, ni surtout les savants » presents several marked tones. Initial stresses mark the start of the two parts introduced by « ni », underlining the symmetry of the construction. Whereas the use of the LH tone on « poètes » involves the listener in what is said, the HL- tone stresses the importance of the word « savants » for the message, which will be further commented on by the speaker in what follows. The last part of the fragment provides an example of dislocation embedded in a proposition introduced by the conjunction « alors que ». The construction is accompanied by the predicted prosodic markers: OPB between the saturated verb cluster and the dislocated element, terminal contour on the verb cluster, and appendix contour on the dislocated part. The HL- tone on the verb cluster shows the importance of the word « objectif » to the assertion, while signaling the involvement of the speaker. The contribution of intonation observed in the analyzed fragment can be summed up as follows. First, intonation subdivides the speech chain into three major units, terminated by a maximal prosody boundary. These units may or may not be coextensive with traditional syntactic phrases, as indicated by the autonomy of subordinate clauses. 1 ( [j'ai divisé en catégories ce ce cette mâle assurance] // [cet annuaire de la misogynie] // [comme dans les pages jaunes de l'annuaire en France] // [catégories professionnelles L-L- ] ) 2 ( [parce qu'on voit qu'aucune n'est épargnée] // [ni les poètes ni surtout les savants HL- ] ) 3 ( [alors que ça devrait être objectif HL- la science] )

Second, it makes explicit the internal structure of these major units, by means of prosodic grouping. This allows for the association of parts without segmental, morpho-syntactic indications. Initial stress provides additional 15

cf. also Berrendonner 2002: 28.

98

Piet MERTENS

internal structure. These two aspects may be visualised as follows. 1 ([j'ai divisé en catégories ce ce cette mâle assurance] // [cet annuaire de la misogynie] // ( [comme dans les pages jaunes de l'annuaire en France] // [catégories professionnelles L-L- ] ) ) 2 ([parce qu'on voit qu'aucune n'est épargnée] // [ni les poètes ni surtout les savants HL- ] ) 3 ( [alors que ça devrait être objectif HL- la science] )

Third, intonation adds information that could not be expressed in another way, e.g. by lexical, morphological or syntactic means. This is the case of marked intonation morphemes such as final and initial stress tones. 1 ([j'ai divisé en catégories ce ce cette mâle assurance] // [cet annuaire de la misogynie] // ( [comme dans les pages jaunes de l'annuaire en France LH ] // [catégories professionnelles L-L- ] ) ) 2 ([parce qu'on voit qu'aucune n'est épargnée] // [ni les poètes ni surtout les savants HL- ] ) 3 ([alors que ça devrait être objectif HL- la science] )

6. Discussion and conclusion Nowadays, there seems to be a consensus (Blanche-Benveniste 2004, Berrendonner 2004) that the notion of the sentence, as inherited from traditional grammar, does not constitute an operational unit for the segmentation of the speech chain into minimal discourse units. Several alternative units have been proposed for French. In her critical analysis of these alternatives, Simon 2003: 131 observes a tendency towards a fragmentation of discourse into smaller units, some smaller than the syntactic proposition. However, the definitions of these alternative units refer to the mental representation of discourse information by the speaker and the listener, and it is not clear how one can verify statements about these representations. In contrast, the segmentation proposed here relies on several types of information, namely dependency relations, syntactic construction and prosodic form, which are readily observed and reproducible and largely unambiguous. In a first step, the establishment of the dependency network leads to the identification of autonomous dependency networks, which are combined into larger structures by means of syntactic constructions or prosodic grouping. This results in a reproducible segmentation based on formal criteria that are both objective and verifiable.


99

In common approaches to discourse analysis, prosody is often treated with low regards. Typically, the hierarchical organisation of the analyzed discourse fragment is set out, on the basis of logical or pragmatic relations between the discourse units. Only then is prosody considered in order to determine to what extent it confirms the assumed organisation. In the predictive approach, in contrast, prosody receives a prominent role, equal to other organising principles in syntax such as valency, dependency and construction. It is intonation that determines whether two otherwise independent units are part of a larger structure, and whether or not an information unit is completed. Moreover, in our approach, the role of intonation is not limited to the hierarchical organisation of bits of speech. On the contrary, a variety of prosodic forms are identified which make explicit other types of information, such as the informational status of this or that element or the way in which the speaker presents that information. The prediction of default intonation enables a separation between informational aspects linked to syntactic structure and aspects contributed by intonation. It appears that syntactic constructions are not neutral with respect to prosody. Default prosody allows a characterisation of the informational status of elements, without the need for a preliminary semantic interpretation of the message or pragmatic context. Instead of providing a priori definitions of notions such as topic, focus, assertion, we merely observe that specific parts in some constructions, given their prosodic properties, will be interpreted as topic, focus, information background, and the like. Our analysis moves from form to meaning, not the reverse. We do not deny that discourse presents levels of organisation other that those indicated by syntactic or prosodic relations. We do not question the existence of anaphoric relations, coreference relations, logical relations between propositions, world knowledge representation, or the dynamic nature of conversation. As it is not obvious that linguistics is able to provide the tools required to describe the inferences made by speakers, it is wise to take full advantage of tangible aspects such as prosody and syntax. References Berrendonner, Alain (1990) Pour une macro-syntaxe. Travaux de Linguistique 21, 25-36. Berrendonner, Alain (2002b) Les deux syntaxes. Verbum 24, 23-36. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire (2002) Phrase et construction verbale. Verbum 24 (1/2), 7-22. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire; Bilger, Mireille; Rouget, Christine & Eynde, Karel van den (1990) Le français parlé. Etudes grammaticales. Coll.

100

Piet MERTENS

Sciences du langage. Paris: Editions du CNRS. Blanche-Benveniste, Claire; Delofeu, José; Stefanini, Jean & Eynde, Karel van den (1984) Pronom et syntaxe. L'approche pronominale et son application au français. Paris: SELAF. Di Cristo, Albert; Auran, Cyril; Bertrand, Roxane; Chanet, Catherine; Portes, Cristel; Régnier, Alain (2004) Outils prosodiques et analyse du discours. Cahiers de l'Institut de Linguistique de Louvain 30 (1-3), 27-84. Dooren, Karin van & Eynde, Karel van den (1982) A structure for the intonation of Dutch. Linguistics 20, 203-235. Eynde, Karel van den & Blanche-Benveniste, Claire (1978) Syntaxe et mécanismes descriptifs: présentation de l'approche pronominale. Cahiers de Lexicologie 32, 3-27. Eynde, Karel van den & Dooren, Karin van (1983) Intonation and syntactic structure in Dutch. ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics 60/61, 27-42. Eynde, Karel van den; Mertens, Piet & Swiggers, Pierre (1998) Structuration segmentale et suprasegmentale en syntaxe: Vers un modèle intégrationniste de l’écrit et de l’oral. in: Bilger, Mireille ; van den Eynde, Karel & Gadet, Françoise (1998), Analyse linguistique et approches de l'oral. Recueil d'études offert en hommage à Claire Blanche-Benveniste. Collection "Orbis/Supplementa 10", Leuven-Paris: Peeters. pp. 33-57. Eynde, Karel van den & Mertens, Piet (2003) La valence: l’approche pronominale et son application au lexique verbal. Journal of French Language Studies 13, 63-104. Hirst, Daniel and Di Cristo, Albert (eds.) (1998) Intonation Systems. A Survey of Twenty Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambrecht, Knud (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Lambrecht, Knud (2001) A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics 39, 3. 463-516. Mertens, Piet (1987) L’intonation du français. De la description linguistique à la reconnaissance automatique. Thèse de doctorat non publiée, Université de Leuven. Mertens, Piet (1992) L'accentuation de syllabes contiguës. ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics 95-96, 145-165. Mertens, Piet (1993a) Accentuation, intonation et morphosyntaxe. Travaux de Linguistique 26, 21-69. Mertens, Piet (1993b) Intonational grouping, boundaries, and syntactic structure in French. in House, D. & Touati, P. (ed) (1993) Proceedings of an ESCA Workshop on Prosody, September 27-29, 1993, Lund (S)


101

Working Papers 41 (Lund Univ., Dept. of Linguistics), pp. 156-159. Mertens, Piet (1997) De la chaîne linéaire à la séquence de tons. Traitement Automatique des Langues 38 (1), 27-51. Mertens, Piet (2004a) Quelques allers-retours entre la prosodie et son traitement automatique. Le français moderne 72(1), 39-57. Mertens, Piet (2004b) Un outil pour la transcription de la prosodie dans les corpus oraux. Traitement Automatique des Langues 45 (2), 109-130. Mertens, Piet; Goldman, Jean-Philippe, Wehrli, Éric; Gaudinat, Arnaud (2001a) La synthèse de l'intonation à partir de structures syntaxiques riches. Traitement Automatique des Langues 42(1), 145-192. Mertens, Piet; Auchlin, Antoine; Goldman, Jean-Philippe; Grobet, Anne; Gaudinat, Arnaud (2001b) Intonation du discours et synthèse de la parole : premiers résultats d'une approche par balises. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 23, 189-209. Rossi, Mario (1999) L'intonation, le système du français : description et modélisation. Gap – Paris : Ophrys. Coll. L'essentiel français. Roulet, Eddy; Auchlin, Antoine; Moeschler, Jacques (1985, 1991) L'articulation du discours en français contemporain. Bern: Lang. Simon, Anne Catherine (2003) La structuration prosodique du discours en français. Une approche multidimensionnelle et expérientielle. Bern : Peter Lang. Tesnière, Lucien (1969,1988) Eléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klinksieck.

English and German Prosody — A Contrastive Comparison — Manfred MARKUS 1. Introduction and state of the art Especially in British terminology, ‘prosody’ is the branch of linguistics that “goes beyond the study of phonemes to deal with such features as length, rhythm, stress, pitch, intonation, and loudness in speech” (McArthur 1992: 818). In American research, this area is also known as ‘suprasegmental phonology’, whereas the term ‘prosody’ is generally used for the theory and study of versification, i.e. the formal aspects in stanzas and lines of verse (cf. McArthur, loc. cit.). This ambivalence of the term ‘prosody’ suggests a proximity of every-day language to the language of verse. Such an affinity has occasionally been argued in view of rhyme and other patterns of repetition in normal English speech (cf. Knowles 1987: 85; Markus 1995), but seems far-fetched or non-existent with regard to German. Accordingly, the German term Prosodie is, as in the American terminology, generally used for features of verse1, and the usual cover term for features of length, rhythm, stress etc. is Intonation. Ignoring this terminological turmoil, however, the present paper will use the term ‘prosody’ in the British way to cover the linguistic features of the implicitly musical elements of spoken language both in English and German. Basically, this means dealing with three physical parameters of sounds, (a) their extension in time (length/duration), including patterns of regularity; (b) their loudness/sound intensity, as caused by wave amplitudes, and (c) their pitch or pitch contours, as caused by sound frequencies. These basic parameters combine with each other to create more complex ones. ‘Rhythm’ is made up by length, loudness and pitch when applied regularly; ‘stress’ (otherwise also referred to as ‘salience’ or ‘prominence’, cf. Halliday 1970: 1-3) is a term based on loudness and pitch in combination with concomitant aspects of length (such as speed and pauses); and ‘intonation’ is mainly pitch and loudness modified in their temporal extension. Things would be less complicated if all these parameters worked in the 1

One of the few counterexamples is Schwitalla 1997. But in a recent representative publication on features of spoken German (Fiehler et al. 2004), the term Prosodie is not used at all.

104

Manfred MARKUS

same way in different languages and dialects. This is, of course, not the case. So-called tone languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, use syllable pitch for semantic purposes (cf. Crystal 1987: 172). But in both English and German, prosodic features, apart from word stress2, have the pragmatic function of marking such things as communicative intention, emphasis, suggestiveness of meaning, indifference or involvement, degrees of politeness and speech acts. As is obvious from everyday experience and also from the controversial discussion and definition of politeness principles (cf., e.g., Leech 1983:84), pragmatic rules are, more than grammatical ones, subject to national, dialectal and even personal variation. And while “intonation is perhaps the most deep-rooted and the least conscious of all aspects of linguistic behaviour” (Robert A. Hall, quoted in Davidsen-Nielsen and Ulseth 1989:8), it is definitely the one where even native speakers often fail – it is a common experience that news speakers or presenters using a teleprompter sometimes (re)produce their texts too mechanically, obviously without fully understanding them. Such performance deficits imply that prosody is based on rules and that prosodic features, far from being mere decoration of speech, are closely connected with the sense and grammatical structure of utterances. Just as the theme-rheme distribution, or better, the ‘communicative dynamism’ within clauses of a text (Firbas 1964), is connected with word order, so prosody, though primarily attributable to pragmatics, interacts with syntax. Again: this interaction does not work universally, but to some extent language-specifically (cf. Pilch 1984:201) – as, it is hoped, the following contrastive analysis of English and German will show. Previous research on English and German prosody has been extremely controversial (cf. the survey in Scuffil 1982:71-76; Whitworth 2002:175-178) and overwhelming in quantity (some 300 entries in the MLA Bibliography since 1961). Almost all contributions have, however, hardly been contrastive3, being often merely descriptive or too specific in their aims to throw light on the connection of prosody with syntax.4 By contrast, this paper will try to follow Halliday (1967; 1970:21), defining intonation as an integral part of 2 3

4

cf. the noun ‘éxport’ and the verb ‘to expórt’, where the different stress pattern has the (syntactic and semantic) function as a marker of word class. In the sense that the contrasts are seen as parts of a unified/system-based whole (as, e.g., by Hawkins 1986). I have tried to pursue this contrastive method in an earlier paper (Markus 1992), which this one partly draws on. cf., e.g., Esser 1988, Wieden and Nemser 1991, Mindt 2001, for English; Schwitalla 1997 and Fiehler et al. 2004 for German. In all these cases it is difficult to see the wood (of the language system) for the trees (of descriptive detail); cf. Hjelmslev's early complaint (1963/1970: 5) that the linguistic point of view was missing in “all this many-sided study”.

English and German Prosody

105

grammar. On the other hand, it is striking that many recent studies on prosody, both in English and German, tend to do justice to the role of varieties in the two languages (e.g., Knowles 1987: ch. 5-9; Schwitalla 1997:141-167) so that there is no focus on the systematic link between different prosodic factors within one variety, preferably the standard. This paper cannot pursue the aim of giving a full description of all features that are in some way connected with the length, loudness and pitch of sounds in both English and German. In particular, it will not unduly be concerned with phonemic and phonotactic details (for these, cf. Couper-Kuhlen 1993:79-100; Vennemann 1991), but give particular attention to the suprasegmental features of phrases and preferably clauses; in line with Esser (1975:120-126), these features could be called the ‘macrosyntax’ of intonation. On the other hand, the present author will abstain from trying to exhaust the theoretical and generally communicative aspects of spoken language (for which see Esser 1975:120-126, Schank and Schoenthal 1983 and Fiehler et al. 2004), but focus on interface issues between syntax and prosody. 2. Length Length, i.e. the extension of sound in time, moreover loudness and pitch are the ‘raw material’ of prosodic structuring. But they have different ranks and different modes of functioning in English and German. As regards length, it is well-known that the quantity of vowels – unlike that of consonants - is a phonemically distinctive feature in both English and German (cf. ‘ship’ vs ‘sheep’, Wall vs Wahl). Moreover, in English, but not in German, the length of a vowel is allophonically reduced before voiceless consonants: ‘bit’ vs ‘bid’ (cf. Kohler 1995:111). But beyond this, the feature [length] when modified to create a changing tempo of speech (Sprechtempo) has prosodic implications. It is here that German and English differ. In German these implications are purely communicative ones. Phonemically short or long vowels can be lengthened in colloquial speech to underline the speaker’s attitude involved, be it emphasis of statement (ja-a, da-a5), exclamation (a-ah, o-oh), or question raising (wie-ie/ wa-as/so-o?). This is, however, a marginal function of length in that it seems to concern mainly particles and function words. The quantitative variation can also go in the other direction: all examples just quoted are used in everyday casual situations with an extremely short vowel. Thus, ja (with an extra short a) would be common in telephone conversation (where short pragmatic signals 5

This notation, with the repeated vowel after a hyphen, is meant to express the extralong pronunciation of the vowel.

106

Manfred MARKUS

of continuous attention are needed). Average short a is the default form for normal conversation. But on the day of one’s marriage ceremony, one is likely to answer with a formal /ja:/, whereas the version with the hyperlong a-a will be used when people are shouting to somebody from a distance or are emphatic in a less externally conditioned way. It should be added here that length itself is not the tool for expressing attitude; it is, rather, the ‘catalyst’ for the more subtle signals of attitude to materialise – with the help of pitch and loudness contours (see below). It stands to reason that, for example, a high-fall pitch contour on German so-o, which sounds slightly ironical when used for a question, could not manifest itself if the vowel nucleus of so did not have a certain above-average extension in time. While German, then, uses length, in combination with pitch and loudness, as a stylistic marker on the scale between casualness and emphatic or suggestive modes of speaking, English, which is a good example of stress-timed languages, tends to adapt the quantity of syllables to the rhythm conditioned by word stress so that we get units similar to metrical feet. Length in English is therefore systematically interlinked with the accentuation of words, and thus with lexicology, whereas German, or at least its standard, is less stress-timed so that its syllables are not subject to rhythm. On the contrary, rhythm is subject to the given syllables. The tendentially equal length of either ‘feet’ (in English) or syllables (in French) has been generally known since Abercrombie (1967:96f.) as ‘isochrony’ (cf. Crystal 1991:185f.6). The term itself and even more its attribution to special languages have been the item of much heated debate. Some scholars have ‘disbelieved’ in the validity of the whole concept, proving with instrumental phonetics that absolute isochrony does not exist (e.g. Roach 1982; cf. survey in Couper-Kuhlen 1993:12). From a generally typological point of view, Dauer (1983: 56) has surprisingly grouped German and all other Germanic languages together with English as stress-timed (vs French and others as syllable-timed). But, as Halliday (1994:293) has pointed out, the amount of stress-timed isochrony in a special case is subject to the variety of English that one may be concerned with: The tendency towards a regular beat is much more marked in casual, spontaneous speech than in self-conscious monitored speech such as lecturing or reading aloud; it is also, apparently, more marked in British and Australian English than in American or Canadian speech.

6

Unlike Abercrombie, Crystal uses the term, with some sense, only for the syllable-timed subtype.


107

Regularity of rhythm as a result of the weakening of syllables has been claimed also for German (cf. Kohler 1995:211-213; Trouvain 2004:33), but here the weakening process concerns only suffixes and Formwörter (mainly function words). Halliday's latter point, however, deserves particular attention, since not only the Americans and the Canadians, but also many native speakers on the British Isles disregard the stress-timed isochrony in language rhythm which can still be claimed for the traditional British standard. 7 The accent of Londoners, for example, shows a noticeably extended articulation of unstressed syllables8, as in the phrase ‘England, Scotland and Wales’, which Leisi/Mair (1999:16), in my view, wrongly use to demonstrate the role of equal length of syllables in general English. In German, they suggest, things are just the opposite: ‘England, Schottland und Wales’, when set to music, would have to be given punctuated notes (Fig. 1):

Figure 1. Questionable punctuated rhythm in German

Again this is not in line with my own competence as a native speaker. I would mark the stressed syllables less by length than by pitch. The difference of opinion might be due to the authors’ southern German dialectal background (Swiss and Austrian respectively), which I do not share. Reference to one’s own competence is, of course, a subjective criterion to go by in prosody. On the other hand, the seemingly objective results of instrumental phonetics, giving evidence of the non-existence of strict isochrony in English, have been found counter-intuitive and mechanical (cf. Lehiste 1977; Couper-Kuhlen 1993:14). After a long phase of disagreement among scholars one tends to welcome Couper-Kuhlen’s compromising statement (1993:13) that the traditional dichotomy between stress-timing and syllable-timing is increasingly giving way to a view of rhythm as a continuum along which a language or language variety can be placed ...

7

8

The difference between American and British intonation to some extent explains the striking disagreement between British scholars such as Halliday (e.g. 1967) and American ones, such as Bolinger (e.g. 1972). This statement is based on my own observation on the occasion of a year's stay in the London area.

108

Manfred MARKUS

Where, then, are English and German on the scale between stress-timing and syllable-timing? While German, from a generally comparative point of view, may be classified as a stress-timed language (just as English), its standard pronunciation still differs considerably from English. The difference is less striking if dialectal sloppiness is taken as the basis of analysis (cf. Berlin German ham wa nich instead of haben wir nicht). But the question is whether the rhythm of the language can generally be based on this sloppiness in casual speech. As Whitworth (2002:181) has appropriately summarized (in line with a number of detailed previous studies), length is only one factor in the complex constitution of rhythm, the others being syllable structure, the role of vowel reduction, and stress. 9 As regards syllable structure, English syllables are shorter and have a less variable structure than the German ones (Abercrombie 1967:75; Kohler 1995:176). Vowel and consonant reduction are stronger in English than in German and occur in most unstressed syllables, whereas German only allows them in word endings and inflectional morphemes (Delattre 1981:93). Finally, word stress is based more on intensity and syllable duration in English and more on pitch in German (Kaltenbacher 1997:161). As a result of these structural differences between the two languages, German syllables, which are potentially highly variable (they can have up to five consonants after the syllable nucleus, vs only four in English) are, when performed, less subject to possible reduction. After all, German as an inflectional language has many more suffixes for marking its morphological categories than English. Crasis10 and many other forms of elision do occur, but they are widely limited to colloquial and dialectal variation. The various forms of reduction, assimilation and deletion that have been claimed by scholars to be of importance (e.g. Kohler 1995:201-213; Trouvain 2004:32f.) are limited to casual allegro speech much more than in the case of English. Thus, /haspmom@ntszaIt/, instead of /hast du: ain@n momEnt tsaIt/ (‘Hast Du einen Moment Zeit’/‘Do you have a moment to spare’), the example used by Kohler (201) and Trouvain, is on the lowest level of informality and sloppiness (to this point also cf. Schank and Schoenthal 1983:48f.). Moreover, as the example shows, the reduction – unlike reduction in English – leaves content words widely unaffected. In any case, the rhythm of German – no matter whether one includes spoken sloppiness or not – is still inevitably irregular. English syllables, by contrast, are systematically, and not only in 9 10

This is why acoustic computer displays are so difficult to decipher. I.e. contraction in the middle of two words: hat’s for hat es.


109

informal or sloppy articulation, subject to reduction. They are very much dependent on stress, both word and sentence stress. Only in a stressed position do syllables remain unmodified. In unstressed position they are subject to quantitative and qualitative reduction. This has been the case in the history of English for centuries and can still be seen in the present deviation of pronunciation from spelling, whether we take now monosyllabic Germanic words such as ‘make’ and ‘lord’ (< Old English ‘hlaf-weard’) or polysyllabic words of Romance origin, such as ‘factory’, ‘colour’ and ‘temporary’. Knowles (1987:107) rightly remarks that they have all been subject to reduction and syncope (/'f&ktrI/, etc). The reasons lie in the strong tendency of English towards an ‘alternating’ rhythm. This means that stressed syllables tend to occur at approximately regular (‘isochronous’) intervals (cf. McArthur 1992:869) so that the rhythmical units known as feet can be constructed (cf. Halliday 1970:1-3; 1994:292-295). According to this view, surplus unstressed syllables in a foot tend to be compressed and the stressed syllables in monosyllabic feet tend to be lengthened. This sense of a metrical foot, which structures our normal speech, is closely connected with the ubiquitous reduction of unstressed syllables. In the clause “the secretary is here” Southern Standard speakers tend to shorten the four unstressed syllables of ‘secretary is’ to the point where these syllables merge to just one syllable so that we get an alternation of stress and lack of stress: /'sektrIz/. The timing of English syllables according to feet is not totally free from phonological and syntactic implications. For example, ‘that’, when affected by reduction, is identified as the conjunction ‘that’ rather than the pronoun: “I know that ... (/@/)” vs “I know that. (/&/)”. But generally English prose rhythm can be said to be motivated by an aesthetic principle, namely the regularity of rhythm due to the recurrence of the stressed syllables. This aestheticism in everyday English may seem surprising, but then semantic and historical principles of word stress have not, as in German, provided alternative options. They have, in fact, led to a most hybrid inventory of English stress rules. Some verbs are marked by stress against nouns, others are not (cf. ‘the éxport’ vs ‘to expórt’, but ‘the deláy’ vs ‘to deláy’). Romance words in English owe their word stress partly to the original stress conditions in Latin (the stress was on the penultimate syllable), partly to the dominance of the Germanic initial stress11. As a result of the general hybridity of English, derivations often do not share the stress patterns of the base, but are dissociated – cf. ‘phótograph’, ‘photógraphy’, ‘photográphical’; ‘léxicon’, 11

The word ‘garage’, with its two sociolectally distinctive pronunciations (/'g&rIdZ/ and /g@'ra:Z/), illustrates the two stress principles within one lexeme.

110

Manfred MARKUS

‘lexicólogy’. As regards Germanic words, they, too, seem subject to a large number of contradictory rules – cf. ‘únderwear’ vs ‘understánd’. German is less hybrid here than English. As a result, the (Germanic-based) rule that word stress falls fall on the first stem syllable is widely valid in disyllabic words. Longer and all kinds of foreign words have been affected by this rule in that it was interpreted as a penultimate-stress pattern (cf. Kohler 1995:191). Affixes of verbs are usually unstressed, but prefixes of nouns are stressed unless they are secondarily derived from the verbs (Úrlaub; Ersátz from ersétzen). There are also patterns of semantic contrasting, as in ´übersetzen (‘to cross a river or lake’) vs übersétzen (‘to translate’). Learners will be confronted with further traps (cf. details in Kohler 1995:186-191), but all in all reasons of word class, word formation and etymology are close at hand to attribute a given word to its pattern of word stress, whereas English, due to its historically caused hybridity, has word stress rules which are far more opaque and variable, so much so that the regularity of an alternating rhythm could manifest itself as an aesthetic substitute principle. In this case speaking is like breathing: unless special factors intrude, we breathe regularly. 3. Loudness As in the case of length, the prosodic relevance of loudness, or sound intensity, has to be kept apart from its phonemic implications, for example, from the fact that vowels are more intense (i.e. sonourous) than consonants. We will not be concerned with such universal issues, which equally apply to the two languages. The pragmatic and communicative role of loudness functions twofold: loudness is used by speakers – depending on the person, the situation, the speaker’s attitude – in the way of microphone amplification for crossing a distance or for prevailing over noise, or when we are angry or otherwise excited. This may go to the point of shouting, with the declamatory articulation of public speakers before a big audience somewhere in between. Loudness also comes in as a concomitant of pitch. When we speak ‘up’, we speak in both a louder and higher voice than normal. The reasons may be manifold, for example, they may lie in the intention of contrasting two units of speech. The question, however, is to what extent English and German are similar in this respect of loudness contributing to stress patterns. Here it seems vital to keep word stress clearly apart from ‘sentence stress’. According to Kaltenbacher (1997:161), the prominence of a syllable in a German word is marked by high pitch and loudness, but in English it is more marked by syllable duration and intensity. This is demonstrated by the computer display for loudness and pitch in German Himbeere (/'hImbe:r@/)


111

vs English ‘raspberry’ (/'rA:zb(@)rI/), cut out from complete sentences (Fig. 2).12

Hím-

bee-

re

rásp-

berry

Figure 2. Word stress (loudness, pitch and length) in English and German

As regards the suprasegmental stress patterns, i.e. intonation, German and English are similar in marking the prominence of the tone-unit nucleus by pitch, loudness and length combined, but in the other parts of the tone group, English relies more on a functional pitch contour (see below under 4), whereas German has no particular pitch pattern to offer here, but uses length and loudness to mark tone group prominence (cf. Delattre 1965:33). Schematically (Table 1): unit German English E/G ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------word stress pitch, (loudness) length, loudness, (pitch) differ tone group nucleus pitch, loudness, length pitch, loudness, length similar tone group stress length, loudness, (pitch) pitch differ Table 1. Functions of prosodic features in English and German

The features in parentheses are concomitant features. Ignoring these, one may say that loudness in German contributes to sentence stress, in both the nucleus and the tone group as a whole, but less to word stress. By contrast, English uses loudness for marking nuclear salience of a 12

An isolated articulation of the words would immediately evoke the stress pattern of tone groups. – The acoustic displays, provided by the program ‘Speech Analyzer’ (http://www. sil. org), are based on recordings of my own voice and are, thus, provisional.

112

Manfred MARKUS

word/syllable in a tone group, but not for the tone group as a whole. Table 1 also shows that the other and more striking difference between English and German lies in the attribution of pitch. 4. Pitch While pitch is the basis of German word stress (see Fig. 2), English uses it for so-called ‘sentence stress’, i.e. the prominence of certain syllables in a tone group (often a clause).13 Within this framework, interest in pitch should not be limited to the nucleus of a tone group (cf. chapter 5 below).14 In the context of this paper the total range of a pitch contour in a tone group is the more important aspect of pitch because it is here that the two languages fundamentally differ. But what is a ‘tone group’? This is another prosodic term that has a long controversial discussion on its record. Admittedly, the term has some subjective quality about it (cf. Halliday 1967:18). Yet it is needed as a prosodic correlate of the communicative and syntactic structures of spoken language. As Tench rightly remarks (1996:33), neutral tonality in a discourse is characterised by “the functional equivalence of intonation unit, clause and unit of information, linking up phonology with grammar and semantics”. The tone group, then, is that part of a discourse text that the speaker by his voice wishes to identify as an informational unit. In syntax there are phrases and clauses as units, but the communicative or informational structure of clauses is best described in the well-known terms of the Prague school of linguists, ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’, interpreted non-dichotomously in the sense of Firbas’ (1964) ‘communicative dynamism’ 15 . Even if we admit that theme (or ‘topic’) and rheme (or ‘comment’) are often manifold and difficult theoretically to identify in a given passage of text, yet it cannot be questioned that tone groups are essentially motivated by these concepts16. Given this theoretical background, a clause such as 1 13 14 15

16 17

Méine Schwéster Johánna géht jéden Fréitag in die Stádt zum Shóppen.17

‘Sentence stress’ is really a misnomer, since, strictly speaking, its domain is not the sentence, but the tone group (cf. McArthur 1992: 989). On this one-sidedness of researchers’ interest cf. Mindt 2001: 55. There is no need to go into the details of this theory now . But it should be understood that theme and rheme are polar abstractions on a scale so that, beyond the syllables marked by underlining, also the other stressed syllables in an utterance (such as 1) carry some degree of thematic or rhematic weight. – For a detailed discussion of the theory cf. Halliday 1994: 37-67. cf. Tench 1996: 32. For a more elaborate description of the role of the ‘given’ and the ‘new’ parts of tone groups, cf. also Halliday 1970: 40-43; 1994, 295-302. In this paper, word stress is marked by simple accents on the stressed vowels, sentence stress on both the theme and the rheme by (additional) underlining.


113

can be seen in terms of its communicative dynamism, with Johanna as (the main part of) the theme and the rhematic peak on Shoppen. The pitch contour of this clause and its waveform are shown in Fig. 3. Comparing the two profiles makes clear that German marks sentence stress mainly by loudness (amplitude) plus length18 rather than by pitch contour. There is, it is true, a modest prominence of the pitch on the topic (Johanna), and the rheme (Shoppen) is marked by the nuclear rise-fall contour, but the other stressed syllables in the tone group also have slightly higher pitch than their unstressed surroundings. Above all, the tone group does not have the striking declension of the pitch contour so typical of English. The reason is: German can very much rely on its most flexible word order; the given parts of a clause tend to come early in the tone group, whereas the new pieces of information tend to be presented towards the end. 19 It is therefore that Shoppen does not have to be marked by pitch nucleus as noticeably as in English – prominence by loudness and the clause-final position are sufficient signals of its rhematic weight.

Méine Schwéster

Johánna géht jéden Fréitag in die Stádt zum Shóppen.

Figure 3. Waveform and pitch in a German statement clause

18 19

The role of length is reflected, for example, in the extended pitch curve of Johanna compared with the other stressed words. The subtlety of Halliday’s (1994: 299-302) distinction between theme/rheme and given/new, based on the speaker's and the listener’s point of view respectively, is not needed for the purpose of this paper.

114

Manfred MARKUS

Now, depending on the context and the essence of what speakers of 1 want to add as ‘new’ to the hearers’ previous information, they can choose from many syntactic options, such as (to mention only three): 2 3 4

Zum Shoppen geht meine Schwester Johanna jeden Freitag in die Stadt. Jeden Freitag geht meine Schwester Johanna zum Shoppen in die Stadt. Meine Schwester Johanna geht jeden Freitag zum Shoppen in die Stadt.

Obviously German can easily functionalise its syntax to make clear what the informative essence of an utterance (its communicative dynamism) is. Clear nuclear marking by pitch is only needed in exceptional cases when syntax does not ideally correlate with the theme-rheme structure, as in 4. Here the salience of jeden (‘every single’) is based on pitch prominence. On the part of the theme, Johanna (as against another sister, for example) is interpreted as the real topic of the tone group the more the stressed syllable of the word Johanna is marked by pitch as the head of the tone group. English is, as is well-known, much less flexible in adapting its syntax to theme-rheme distribution, due to its strict word order rules. Given this background, it seems fair to see the elaborate pattern of English intonation as a substitute for its lack of flexibility in word order. The elaborateness of the pattern consists in that theme and rheme are marked by intonation more unmistakably than in German. In the tone unit (adapted from Halliday 1970: 42) 5

My sister Jane goes shopping in town every Friday.

the default interpretation is to understand ‘Jane’ as the theme of the tone group and ‘Friday’ as the rheme. This interpretation is marked by an extremely high pitch on ‘Jane’ (extreme by German standards), and the second, clearly less prominent peak of pitch on the essential rhematic unit, the first syllable of ‘Friday’. The general descent of the pitch curve, with the initial ‘mountain’ and the final ‘slope’, signals to the audience that the essential point of this piece of information comes at the end and is the time-when. The computer recording gives evidence of the signalling quality of the pitch curve (Fig. 4).

English and German Prosody ‘My si-

ster

Jane

115

goes shopping in town every Fri- day’.

Figure 4. Pitch in an English statement with final nucleus

Unlike German, English needs this regularly significant pitch contour since its word order is hardly reliable in view of the theme-rheme distribution. For example, if our clause was intended as an answer to the question “Where does Jane go shopping every Friday?”, the proper nuclear pitch would, of course, be on ‘town’. Likewise, the question “What does Jane do in town every Friday?” would trigger the answer with the nuclear pitch on ‘shopping’, even though the word is in the middle of the clause (Fig. 5). ‘My si-

ster

Jane goes

shopping in town every

Fri- day’.

Figure 5. Pitch in an English statement with early nucleus

For an analysis of English pitch prominence a theoretical understanding of the ‘tone group’ (or ‘tone unit’ or ‘speech group’) seems helpful. A ‘tone group’ divides into ‘pre-head’, ‘head’, ‘body’, ‘nucleus’ and ‘tail’.20 While only the nucleus is obligatory, all the other elements are optional 21 . Utterances with only a nucleus are totally normal in dialogue, where we do not insist on rounded-off clauses and where even the topic (the head) may be interpretable from the co(n)text. Here is an invented piece of discourse with 20

cf. Arnold/Hansen 1979: 209, where the English terms are explained to go back to the 1920’s. 21 This is perhaps the reason why Halliday (1970: 42), in his discussion of tonic prominence, focusses on the discussion of the nucleus, at the cost of the other members of the tone group.

116

Manfred MARKUS

different degrees of explicitness (Table 2): (pre-head) (head) (body) nucleus (tail) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It's been a very enjoyable evening for all of us.22 It has been nice talking to you. We hope we haven't stayed too long. Not at all. Thank you so much. Your umbrella! Thank you. Good night. Bye. Table 2. Different prosodic types in a discourse

The pattern of the tone group, in spite of the many possible zero positions, is as much a basis of orientation for spoken communication as the clause is for the syntactic one. For discourse to work one always has to know what an utterance is about and what its nucleus is. The prosodic nucleus, as the main and compulsory unit, is not reliably marked by its only tendentially (but not regularly) final or penultimate position, i.e. by syntax, but by its suggestive internal pitch contour. Before the different options of nuclear pitch contour are discussed, it seems, however, fair to summarise and to interpret the results of our instrumental analyses concerning the tone group: (1) Both English and German tone units have a compulsory nucleus and an optional pre-head, head, body and tail. Headless tone units correspond to syntactic ellipses of the theme of utterances. Needless to say that natural discourse can more often do without the explicit statement of the theme than, for example, news reports. (2) In common English statements, the head is considerably higher in pitch than the nucleus and the pitch falls down within the body in steps from one stressed syllable to the next. It is this regular pattern of the ‘flight of stairs’ that helps identify the head and the nucleus, and, thus, the theme and the rheme. In German there is less of a need for identifying theme and rheme because, due to its more flexible word order, speakers can usually front what needs to be topicalised, no matter whether it happens to be the subject or not. This syntactic flexibility of German was demonstrated in 2 to 4 above. By contrast, the sample clause “my sister Jane goes shopping in town every Friday” does not allow for much syntactic variation (except for split constructions). But the lack of syntactic flexibility is made up for in English by greater prosodic subtlety. In 22

The example has been taken from Arnold/Hansen 1979: 209.


117

addition to the variants of the clause in Fig. 4 and 5, with the nuclear stress on ‘Friday’ and ‘shopping’ respectively, several other theme-rheme interpretations are imaginable (as Halliday 1970:42, demonstrates); in fact, every unit of the tone group could be rhematised, given that the question (= theme) has been defined accordingly. (3) The hearer can reckon with two peaks in a tone group (on the head and the nucleus) unless there is ellipsis, which means that the topic and the other, optional parts of the tone group are to be interpreted from cotext or context. In view of the role of discourse and its elliptical units, this paper has to focus now, in line with the greater part of intonation research, on the nucleus of the tone group. 5. Prosodic variation in statements Daniel Jones has demonstrated nuclear intonation contours by distinguishing six different pitch types of the word ‘yes’ (Table 3).23 1a. 1b. 2a. 2b. 3. 4.

low fall: high fall: low rise: high rise: fall-rise: rise-fall:

Table 3.

_ Yes. = That is so. ` Yes. = Of course it is so. 7 Yes. = I understand that; please continue. ΄ Yes. = Is it really so? ˇ Yes. = That may be so. ˆ Yes. = Most certainly.

Types of nucleus contours (from Jones 1964: 277)

These seemingly irrelevant, but in fact pragmatically decisive rises and falls of the pitch within the short phase of the nucleus, as well as the combinations of rises and falls, also exist in German and seem to be quite universal. The six types, which have often been quoted (cf. O’Connor and Arnold 1973: 4f.; Bald 1976: 38f; Arnold and Hansen 1979: 208), are based on four parameters: falling pitch; rising pitch; combination of fall and rise; and the relative height of pitch (low vs high). To bring some light into Jones' types, it seems fair to say that the basic pitch contour of a nucleus in statements is a falling one (types 1a and b). The fall of the voice suggests matter-of-factness, or, as Halliday (1970: 23) suggests, “certainty with regard to yes or no”. If the voice starts exceptionally high, this is interpretable as emphasis (type 1b) of this self-assertive attitude. By contrast, the rising pitch 23

For a more detailed, yet in some points less transparent, description of the different options (‘tones’) cf. Halliday 1970: 10-21.

118

Manfred MARKUS

(2a and b) essentially suggests some kind of appeal to the interlocutor. In the case of a yes-no question one asks for a response; in commands the appeal refers to the required pursuance of directives; and in utterances which are statements on the surface the rising pitch suggests certain implications of the given act of communication. The exact interpretation very much depends on the context. Jones' “please continue” interpretation holds true for telephone talks, but we use the same pattern more generally, both in English and German, for example when asking somebody in after a knock on the door. In reciting and in discourse, interlocutors may also raise their voice at the end of statements to mark their wish to continue, or in order not to be interrupted. High rise always suggests emphasis, not only that of a question (type 2b), but possibly also that of a command. For example, a high-rise command “go!” signals ultimate resoluteness on the part of the speaker. Jones' last two types (3 and 4) are composites including the suggestiveness of the two types just discussed. A rise after a high fall suggests that the statement does not have ultimate validity, but is in need of complementation. And in the last type the high fall suggesting matter-of-factness is preceded by the high rise, which signals the reproachful tone addressed to the interlocutor (implication: “Don't you know?”, or “Why are you asking again?”). Jones' six types in principle function the same way in German (cf. Kohler 1995:198). But on the other hand, it is striking to see that the attitudes suggested in English by the modulation of the nucleus are often explicitly expressed by modal particles. Instead of a high fall `Ja (1b), German native speakers may as well say ja natürlich, ja klar, ja sicher. Type 2b (high rise) may be expressed lexically by German na ja and ach ja. Type 3, with its fall-rise first suggesting a statement and then a question/appeal, could be correlated with ja schon, and the last pattern (4: rise-fall) with ja doch. Note that lexis only works when accompanied by the right stress pattern: type 4, for example, needs the stress (in the form of pitch, loudness and length) on the first element – ja doch would mean something totally different, namely that the speaker is contradicting an interlocutor's negative statement. The pragmatic subtleties of the German modal particles are of no concern in this paper.24 The few examples may suffice to show that German uses stress on the nucleus as a marker, but with some support from lexis. English, by contrast, uses modal particles sparingly (e.g. in “well yes”), and relies more on the intonational nucleus. In John Cleese’s famous comedy series ‘Fawlty Towers’ the pitiable landlord of the hotel is constantly 24

But cf. Helbig’s Lexikon deutscher Partikeln (1988: 165-172 on ja).


119

harassed by his next-to-omniscient wife with “I ^know”, intoned with the (high) rise-fall of Jones’ type 4. Even a most shrewish German wife would not raise her voice as much as Mrs Faulty, but may use modal explicitness instead: Das weiß ich doch/schon (lange)/längst/sehr wohl! 6. Prosodic variation in questions and commands Questions and commands as speech acts have semiotically in common that they are addresses to the interlocutor. In English they accordingly share the feature of nuclear pitch raising: it signals that the speaker hopes for, or wants to encourage, a response. This is the default case. However, wh-questions do not need such a signal since they are marked as questions by the question word: “Where are you _staying?” The default interpretation, with nuclear stress on ‘staying’, is that the question word topicalises “the nature of the missing piece” (Halliday 1994, 46) and ‘(are you) staying’ has the status of the rheme. Alternatively, by stressing ‘where’ the speaker could mark it as the rheme, downgrading the rest of the question to a halfway superfluous thematic tail. Often this tail is not verbalised at all (ellipsis). Only in this case do we have a rising nucleus: “7Where?” By contrast, yes-no questions (“Have you met my friend 7John?”) need the rising prominence of the nucleus. Here the rheme is marked by the nuclear prominence of one of the clause-final units, in this case the very last one, John. But there are all kinds of modifying options. Wh-questions marked by a seemingly redundant nuclear rise suggest empathy (“Where are you 7staying?”) or concerned disgreement (“Where are you 7going?”), in any case some kind of emotionality. Yes-no questions which do not mark their rhematic nucleus as such (“Have you met my friend _John?”) are to be interpreted as routine questions or otherwise rhetorical questions (“What does this _tell us?”) or exclamations (“Haven't I been _quick!”25). Much depends on the context here. If a yes-no question which implies action on the part of the addressee is intoned as a statement, this may well be interpreted as negative emotionality/impatience: “Are you _ready?!” A similar relationship between norm and deviation can be found in the case of commands. For its default or neutral form it seems fair to define the pitch with a low rise: “Don't 7move!” “7Go!”26 A command with a low-fall pitch contour in the nucleus suggests matter-of-factness; the commander takes it for granted that his or her commands are fulfilled: “Don't _move!” 25 26

This example is taken from Arnold/Hansen (1979: 211). Arnold/Hansen (1979: 211) interpret this form as the deviant one (höfliche Aufforderung, Bitte) and the more factual tone as the norm (neutral).

120

Manfred MARKUS

Emotional or attitudinal suggestiveness, both in questions and commands, are one of the “disturbing” factors of a simple correlation of nuclear pitch contours with these sentence types. There is a second source of disturbance: explicit or implicit contrasts. Utterances such as 6 and 7 6 7

would you like 7tea or _coffee? 7take it or _leave it!

mark the end of the alternative list of the options mentioned by the low fall on the second item. If one intones “7tea or 7coffee?”, with a rise on both ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’, the implication is that the list of options is not finished with the coffee yet and that other options of drinks are available.27 Pitch contouring of nuclei in German questions and commands is not basically different from the one just described for English. The nuclear pitch contour suggests the unmodified or otherwise attitudinally or contrastively marked utterances, in particular, the basic types of statements, questions and commands. German discourse, thus, has the gamut of tones that English has, with again a greater share of modal particles. For example, after a positive statement of speaker A, speaker B may refer to it by saying: 8 9 10 11 12

Ach 'ja? Ach 'so? Ach _so? _Ach! So _so!

A's statement questioned by B (irony involved) Surprise and keen interest of B B: 'Yes, but I haven't thought of it.' B: 'What you are telling me sounds surprising.' B: sceptical to ironical comment

With all these German and the preceding English examples this paper has so far focussed on isolated text passages, widely ignoring their subtle conditioning by surrounding text as well as pragmatic complexities. Text continuity is generally marked by a rising tone, for example at the end of a subordinate clause before the main clause: 13 When he 'saw us, | he ran a-_way.

According to Arnold/Hansen (1979:216), from whom text samples 13 and 14 are taken (with modification), such clause-final rises are really functional in English as markers of subordination, whereas coordinated tone groups within a longer sentence do without the final marking of text continuity, cf. 27

cf. Halliday (1970: 22); Arnold/Hansen (1979: 217).


121

14 The referee blew his 'whistle, | and the game _started.

By contrast, German seems to be less subtle here, mechanically marking any text continuation by a nuclear rise, irrespective of the syntactic structure: 15 Der Schiedsrichter blies die 'Pfeife, | und das Spiel be_gann.

This contrast is not so surprising in view of the function of the English nuclear pitch within the tone group. Its additional functionalisation as a marker of cohesive coordination would prosodically overburden the nucleus, whereas German, with its less systematic integration of the nucleus in the tone group, can functionalise nuclear pitch as a marker of text cohesion. 7. Conclusion Halliday (1970:35-49), Cruttenden (1997:68-124) and various other researchers have described many such special cases of nuclear distribution, for example, in appositions, lists, long sentences and clause-final adjuncts. While such issues go beyond the scope of this paper in any case, it can be assumed that they would produce roughly similar results for English and German because they are mainly concerned with pragmatic and communicative aspects of prosody. But it has to be admitted that much work is still waiting for researchers in this interesting field between prosody and grammar. Meanwhile, this paper has tried to pull some of the threads together and, above all, to argue why and how English prosody is different from the German one. Emphasis has been laid on the interconnection of prosody with both morphology and syntax. Since German is quite an inflectional language, it tends to avoid the phonological reduction of inflections, except in (non-inflected) function words and in casual/sloppy speech. By contrast, English, which is more a syntactic (analytic) language, has been under the influence of a ‘reductive trend’ since Middle English so that systematic reduction of unstressed syllables now allows for a tendentially stress-timed isochrony of rhythm. On the other hand, the rigorous syntax of English disallows flexible word order (as practiced in German) along the lines of theme and rheme so that a regular pitch contour within tone groups could develop to fill the semiotic gap. The nucleus part of this pitch contour, which functions similarly in English and German, is generally iconic: while pitch raising means openness towards the communicative partner, lowering of pitch suggests self-certainty and a closed attitude.

122

Manfred MARKUS

The pre-nuclear pitch contour, from the prehead onwards, is a specific feature of English intonation – due to its distinct and steadily descending profile and its implicit function of marking communicative dynamism. By contrast, German uses pitch mainly for word stress. This makes sense since words, less affected by reduction in terms of length and loudness, can thus better preserve their morphological substance. References Abercrombie, D. 1967. Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Arnold, Roland, and Klaus Hansen. 1979 (1975). Englische Phonetik. 3. Aufl. Leipzig. VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. Bald, Wolf-Dietrich. 1976. “Contrastive studies in English and German intonation. survey”. Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 4. 37-47. Bolinger, Dwight L. 1972. Intonation. Selected readings. Harmondsworth. Penguin. Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 1986. An Introduction to English Prosody. Tübingen. Max Niemeyer Verlag. . 1993. English Speech Rhythm. Form and Function in Everyday Verbal Interaction. Amsterdam, Philadelphia. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Cruttenden, Alan. 1997. Intonation. Second ed. (1st ed. 1986). Cambridge. University Press. Crystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge. University Press. . 1991. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 3rd ed. Oxford. Blackwell. Dauer, R.M. 1983. “Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalysed”. Journal of Phonetics 11. 51-69. Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels, and Brit Ulseth. 1989. English Intonation. Copenhagen. Universitetsforlaget. Delattre, P. 1981 (1965). Comparing the phonetic features of English, French. Reprint Darmstadt. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Esser, Jürgen. 1975. Intonationszeichen im Englischen. Tübingen. Niemeyer. , in cooperation with Andrzej Polomski. 1988. Comparing reading and speaking Intonation. Amsterdam. Rodopi. Fiehler, Reinhard, Birgit Barden, Mechthild Elstermann, and Barbara Kraft. 2004. Eigenschaften gesprochener Sprache. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Firbas, Jan. 1964. “On defining the theme in functional sentence analysis.”


123

Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1. 267-80. Halliday, M.A.K. 1967. Intonation and grammar in British English. Mouton. The Hague. . 1970. A course in spoken English intonation. London. Oxford University Press. . 1994 (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. 2nd ed. London. Arnold. Hawkins, John. 1986. A comparative typology of English and German. Unifying the contrasts. London. Routledge. Helbig, Gerhard. 1988. Lexikon deutscher Partikeln. Leipzig. VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. Hjelmslev, Louis. 1963/1970. Language: an introduction, tr. F.J. Whitfield. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. Hockett, Charles. 1958. A Course in Modern Lingustics. New York. MacMillan. Jones, Daniel 1964. An outline of English phonetics. Rev. by A.C. Gimson. Cambridge. Kaltenbacher, E. 1997. “German speech rhythm in L2 acquisiton”. In Leather, J., and A. Jams (eds.) New Sounds '97. Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second-Language Speech. Klagenfurt. The University of Klagenfurt 1997. 159-166. Knowles, Gerald. 1987. Patterns of Spoken English. An Introduction to English Phonetics. London, New York. Longman. Kohler, Klaus H. 1982. “Rhythmus im Deutschen“. Aipuk 20 (Arbeitsberichte Institut für Phonetik Kiel). 89-105. . 1995 (1977). Einführung in die Phonetik des Deutschen. 2. Aufl. Berlin. Erich Schmidt Verlag. Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London. Longman. Lehiste, Ilse. “Isochrony Reconsidered”. Journal of Phonetics 5. 252-263. Leisi, Ernst, and Christian Mair. 1999. Das heutige Englisch. Wesenszüge und Probleme. 8. Auflage. Heidelberg. Universitätsverlag C. Winter. Markus, Manfred. 1992. “Rhythm, stress and intonation in English and German seen contrastively”. New Departures in Contrastive Linguistics, eds. Mair, Christian, and Manfred Markus. Wien. Braumüller. 21-36. . 1995. “The sing-song of chit-chat. Zur Poetizität in der englischen Alltagssprache (am Beispiel der Lautung)”. Moderne Sprachen 39. 1-18. McArthur, Tom (ed.). 1992. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford, New York. UP. Mindt, Ilka. 2001. Intonation im Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus. Falls und fall-rises, Sprecherwechsel, paratones, declination. Tübingen.

124

Manfred MARKUS

Gunter Narr Verlag. Newman, Stanley S. 1946. “On the stress system of English.” Word 2. 171-187. O’Connor, J.D., and G.F. Arnold 1973 (1961). Intonation of colloquial English. 2nd ed. London. Pilch, Herbert. 1984. “Intonation als kommunikatives Problem.” In Halfmann, Ulrich, Kurt Müller and Klaus Weiss (eds.). Wirklichkeit und Dichtung. Studien zur englischen und amerikanischen Literatur. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Franz Link. Berlin. Duncker & Humblot. 195-210. Roach, P. 1982. “On the distinction between stressed-timed and syllable-timed languages”. Crystal, D. (ed.) Linguistic controversies. essays in linguistic theory and practice in honour of F.R. Palmer. London. Arnold. 73-79. Schank, Gerd, and Gisela Schoenthal. 1983. Gesprochene Sprache. Eine Einführung in Forschungsansätze und Analysemethoden. 2. Aufl. Tübingen. Niemeyer. Schwitalla, Johannes. 1997. Gesprochenes Deutsch. Eine Einführung. Berlin. Erich Schmidt Verlag. Scuffil, Michael. 1982. Experiments in Comparative Intonation: A Case Study of English and German. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Tench, Paul. 1996. The intonation systems of English. London: Cassell. Trouvain, Jürgen. 2004. Tempo Variation in Speech Production. Impliciatons for Speech Synthesis. Diss. Universität Saarland. Phonus 8. Saarbrücken. Institut für Phonetik der Universität des Saarlandes. Vennemann, Theo. 1991. “Skizze der deutschen Wortprosodie”, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 10. 86-111. Whitworth, Nicole. 2002. “Speech Rhythm production in three German-English bilingual families”. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics 9. 175-205. Wieden, Wilfried, and William Nemser. 1991. The pronunciation of English in Austria. Tübingen. Gunter Narr Verlag.

Nuclear-Stress Placement by Japanese Learners of English — Transfer from Japanese1 — Hiroko SAITO 1. Introduction Soon after the annual Center Test2 of 2002, a letter was sent to a monthly magazine, Eigo Kyouiku (English teaching), 3 by a high-school English teacher concerning one of the questions on the English exam. The letter candidly expressed the shock experienced by Mr. Ikegami, an experienced teacher of English, when he tried answering the questions and ended up getting one question, which was about placement of the nucleus in a sentence, wrong. The question was the second part of a ‘pronunciation’ question, the first part asking about placement of word stress. The rest of the English exam tests knowledge of vocabulary, idioms, and reading comprehension. All questions are printed and no listening or speaking tasks are required of examinees. Every year, this test follows the same format and students usually prepare for the examinations well beforehand. This is how the question ran:4 For each of the underlined parts, (1) to (4), choose one word which is pronounced with the greatest emphasis: Jim: What job do you eventually want to have? Rie: (1) I haven’t thought about it. Have you? 1 2

3 4

I would like to thank Margaret Maeda for her suggestions and invaluable comments on an earlier version of this paper. A set of exams given once a year by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations in Japan. Most national and public universities and many private universities require students to take these exams and candidates are admitted to a university according to the total score they achieve on the exams. Most students are required to take the English test, regardless of the department they are applying for. Approximately 536,000 examinees sit for the English test each year, and therefore the examination is quite influential. Eigo Kyouiku 2002, vol.51, no. 1:86. The directions are originally in Japanese.

126

Hiroko SAITO Jim: Rie: Jim: Rie: Jim: Rie:

Yeah, I want a job (2)that allows me to travel. Hmm, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? What kind of job? I’d like to be a tour guide. (3)What would you like to do? Now that you mention it, I guess I’d also like a job allowing me to travel. Doing what? (4)I’d like to be a pilot.

For (1), examinees were given the following four words to choose from: haven’t, thought, about, and it. Mr. Ikegami was certain that the answer was haven’t, and when he found out that it was otherwise5 and that he would have lost three points for the mistake had he been a student sitting for the exam, he was deeply shocked. The next day, however, he turned up at work and found out that his fellow Japanese English teachers had also looked at the exams and had gotten the same question wrong in exactly the same way. Neither he nor the other Japanese teachers could understand why the answer wasn’t the strongest accent on haven’t, because they had always thought (and taught) that negative auxiliary verbs were accented. Indeed, Mr. Ikegami’s junior-high-school son’s English textbook6 even contained the following exercise on practising the rhythm of English: ● I like soccer. ● I don’t like tennis.

With this evidence, Mr. Ikegami regained his confidence and realized that the Center Test question itself was to blame, and that it should be criticized. His confidence was strengthened when he discovered that one of the famous cram schools took up the question in its commentary of the Center Test on the Web and said that the word thought could be the strongest emphasized word, but haven’t could also be the correct answer. A question with two possible answers is not a very well-designed exam question, concluded the commentary.7 It became apparent at the time that it was not only Mr. Ikegami, but also numerous other high-school teachers and cram-school instructors who felt uneasy about this type of question, and Mr. Ikegami decided to voice this 5 6 7

The answers are printed in major newspapers as soon as the examinations are over. New Horizon1 (2004: 27). This is a summary of the account in Mr. Ikegami’s first letter to Eigo Kyouiku.

Nuclear-Stress Placement by Japanese Learners of English

127

uneasiness claiming that firstly, this aspect of English was not teachable, and secondly, that there was no correlation between this and the rest of the English exam questions: in other words, those students who answered this particular question correctly did not necessarily score high on the test as a whole, and those who did well overall did not always succeed in answering this specific question correctly. Therefore, this type of question was not valid or suitable to be asked on a written test of English. The third point the English teacher emphasized in his letter was that no correlation could be seen between the ability to answer this type of question and the student’s actual pronunciation of English. According to Mr. Ikegami, who carried out a survey among his students,8 those who were able to answer correctly as to where the nucleus was, did not necessarily have ‘natural-sounding’ pronunciation of English when asked to read a passage out loud. Again, he questions the aim and validity of this kind of paper-and-pencil test. This paper will attempt to explore and explain the problems behind this teacher’s—and the Japanese English learners’—distress. In the present paper, the terms ‘nucleus,’ ‘nuclear stress,’ ‘nuclear accent’ all mean the same: the intonation nucleus of an intonation unit. 2. Is it Possible to Teach Nuclear-Stress Placement? After I read the English teacher’s article, I wrote in to the same journal9 and explained that there were certain rules concerning nuclear-stress placement and that such rules were indeed teachable. I explained about the last content word receiving nucleus (what the Center Test was asking for when it said “the word which is pronounced with the greatest emphasis”) when the whole sentence was new information, i.e. in broad focus. I also explained the difference between words which were pronounced clearly and with strong vowels (as in the case of haven’t) and those pronounced not only clearly but with accompanying pitch change (as with thought, the only content word in sentence (1)). The rule is no secret and has been known to phoneticians for a long time. Japanese phoneticians too, are aware of the rules, and books on English phonetics regularly contain this information. It just so happens that some writers and publishers of high-school English textbooks 10 have not been including sufficient information or correct explanations on the prosody of English. 8 9 10

Results are tabulated in his second letter to the magazine. Eigo Kyouiku 2002. vol.51, no.5:81. High-school textbooks in Japan are usually written by a group of high-school teachers and academics in the field concerned, along the guidelines set down by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and authorized by the same ministry before they are adopted by the schools.

128

Hiroko SAITO

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule that states that the last content word of an intonation unit receives the nuclear accent in non-contrastive situations, for example, in cases of so-called ‘event’ sentences11 where it is the subject noun, and not the verb, that receives nuclear stress: Watch OUT! That BUILDing’s falling down.12

Here, the whole sentence is new information, and yet, instead of the last content word, the noun building is allotted the nucleus. However, upon checking past Center Tests,13 it became clear that the test-makers were obviously avoiding setting questions around such exceptions to the rule: all nuclei were either neutral as in (1), (2), and (4) in the above-cited question, or contrastive like in (3). English intonation, especially nucleus placement, does get complicated when it comes to having to teach exceptions to the rule. And there are many cases where more than one ‘correct’ answer is possible in the same context. However, there are many more cases where teaching of the nucleus placement rule for neutral sentences and contrastive accent placement is not a difficult task. Moreover, it can be useful because knowing where the nucleus should be placed has much to do with understanding the syntax and interpreting the meaning of the sentence correctly. After all, tests asking which syllable receives primary stress in citation forms of English words have always been a popular item on tests and exams at all levels in Japan, and no one denies the importance of knowing which syllable receives the word accent. Such knowledge helps one to pronounce English words correctly. Therefore, in that sense, asking about placement of nuclei has its place even on a paper-and-pencil test. The current trend in English teaching around the world is towards teaching of a ‘global’ model of English: that is, in this day and age when second-language speakers of English outnumber those speakers whose mother tongue is English, the important goal in learning English is to make oneself understood and to understand what other people—and they are not necessarily native speakers of English—are saying, and not to sound exactly like an American (or an English person, Canadian, Australian, etc.) It is only natural for speakers whose mother tongue is not English to retain the pronunciation features of their native languages when speaking English, and 11 12 13

Cruttenden (1990, 1997). Cruttenden (1990:12). Traced back to 1997, for both the main test and the second test given a week after the main test for those who could not take the first test for inevitable reasons.


129

teachers should not waste time forcing students to shed these accents. However, there are certain elements of pronunciation that the student should struggle to acquire and the teachers should teach in order to achieve the goal of a global model of English, and Jenkins (2000) proposes such a model. Jenkins goes through various (segmental and supra-segmental) aspects of the pronunciation of English considering what to keep and what to discard, in order to set up pedagogic priorities for her model of English. As for intonation, she asserts that of the three principal areas, i.e. pitch movement, nuclear stress, and tone units, nuclear stress is one of the most important features that should be taught as part of the ‘core’ in her model of ‘international’ English.14 After running an experiment with L1 and L2 speakers of English to test both the receptive side (hearing nuclear stress in its intended position) and the productive side (placing nuclear stress appropriately and pronouncing it correctly for others to hear), she finds that the receptive aspect is easier for learners to acquire compared to production. Through this and other experiments as well as experience, Jenkins states that ‘the greatest phonological obstacles to mutual intelligibility appear to be deviant core sounds in combination with misplaced and/or misproduced nuclear stress.’15 However, ‘(a)s far as nuclear placement is concerned, the rules, both unmarked and contrastive, are simple enough for learners to master in the classroom…. Pedagogically, nuclear stress can be easily integrated receptively and productively into almost all classroom work….’16 In sum, it is possible, as well as essential, to teach nuclear stress placement rules as a part of the skill towards effective communication in English. 3. Nuclear Stress on a Function Word: A Japanese tendency At this point, I would like to return to the problem of why teachers and students decided that the word haven’t should receive the greatest emphasis in the sentence I haven’t thought about it, as well as survey other tendencies that Japanese English learners reveal when reading English sentences. Experiment by Sakamoto Inspired by the series of articles in Eigo Kyouiku, Sakamoto (2005)17 carried out an experiment on English learners’ awareness (or lack of awareness) of the intonation nucleus. She recorded readings of the English dialogue that appeared in the 2002 Center Test English exam mentioned 14 15 16 17

Jenkins (2000: 151-156). Jenkins (2000: 155). Ibid. Unpublished graduation thesis submitted in January 2005 to the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, written under the supervision of the present writer.

130

Hiroko SAITO

above, by 22 Japanese university students. She added some more sentences at the end to include ‘event’ sentences which were not in the original test. After the first reading, Sakamoto explained briefly what intonation nuclei were, and where they usually appeared in English sentences. After hearing this short18 explanation on the basic rules of nucleus placement, the subjects were asked to mark on paper which words in the dialogue should have received nuclear stress, according to the rules. Incorrect markings were pointed out by Sakamoto on the spot. Then, the same subjects were asked to read the dialogue again, this time looking at the nucleus markings. Incorrect readings were indicated, and the subjects were made to practice repeatedly until they could read with correct emphasis. These readings were also recorded. One month after the first meeting, the same subjects were summoned and shown a new dialogue in addition to the previous dialogue. They were asked to put down markings to show where the nuclei should be, then told to read the dialogues out loud to see if the teaching session of the previous month still had any effect on the subjects’ performance. Results As was expected from how English teachers reacted directly after the 2002 exam, more than half (54.5%) of the subjects in this experiment read with the nucleus on haven’t in the sentence I haven’t thought about it, in their very first reading, before any explanation or practice. Asked why they put so much prominence on this word, the subjects replied that because the sentence was a negative answer to a question, and just like answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a question, they thought they should pronounce this negative word haven’t clearly and strongly. Even after the subjects were given a short lecture on what kind of words were likely to contain nuclear stress, that is, content words with information as against function words, the number of people marking haven’t actually increased to 68%. The more conscious that students became of the meaning of the sentences, the more they chose haven’t. As for how the subjects read out the dialogue after an explanation was given about nuclear stress placement, and correct placement for the nucleus for each intonation unit of the dialogue had been taught, only three people (13.6%) read with emphasis on haven’t, and 68% were able to read with the correct nucleus on thought. For the other items, similar improvements compared to the first readings could be observed after teaching of the rules. 18

Approximately five minutes per person.


131

Apart from haven’t, other words wrongly accented19 in the subjects’ first readings were job in What kind of job? / do in What would you like to do? / travel in I guess I’d also like a job allowing me to travel. There was a tendency among the subjects to place the nucleus on the very last word of sentences even for sentences that should have received contrastive stress. For these sentences, however, the number of subjects marking nuclear stress on the last words decreased dramatically after they acquired knowledge about nucleus placement and when they were more conscious of the difference between new and given information. Thus, there were only two instances of marking on job instead of the seven people reading with the nucleus in the first readings, and for do in What would you like to do, sixteen subjects of the first readings decreased to only two people marking the last word, and the number was fifteen decreasing to ten for travel in I guess I’d also like a job allowing me to travel. Looked at another way, the number of subjects that placed the nuclear stress on the correct word increased dramatically after the lecture on the rules, as can be seen in figure 1: 20 15 first reading nucleus marking second reading

10 5 0

kind

Figure 1.

you

also

The number of people that placed the nucleus on the correct word

One important comment made by Sakamoto is that although there were no nuclei placed on the interrogative what in the following sentences during the very first readings, the interrogatives were read with a noticeably high pitch and with stress. What job do you eventually want to have? What kind of job? What would you like to do?

None of the subjects read the interrogative as containing the nucleus, i.e. 19

Words that should have contained the nuclei have been underlined.

132

Hiroko SAITO

with pitch change, and yet, five, six, and four subjects respectively, for the three sentences, marked what as the nucleus on paper after they had listened to the explanations and when they were given time to think. Again, Sakamoto asked for the reason they thought this interrogative should be emphasized, and the answer was that it was a very important word carrying important information. If they were being asked a question, the students said, they would always listen closely for the interrogative, so they only thought it natural that interrogatives should be pronounced clearly and strongly. Through Sakamoto’s experiment, we have seen some tendencies among Japanese English learners: the tendency, or assumption, that negative auxiliaries should be given greatest emphasis; the tendency towards end focus when not paying attention to the meaning of the sentence and therefore missing contrastive stress; and the tendency for high pitch on interrogatives (in this case, the word what) at the very beginning of a sentence. From another point of view, a different experiment was carried out by Mori (2005), who recorded and analyzed readings of sentences by Japanese English learners to see the level of pitch especially in sentence-initial positions. Experiments by Mori Mori had 30 Japanese university students read out sentences, all of which began with the unstressed pronouns I or they followed by a stressed lexical verb (think, thought, or bought). The intonation nucleus lies elsewhere in the sentence, since Mori’s concern is not with nuclear stress placement, but to ascertain the tendency of Japanese learners starting a sentence with high-pitched pronouns that should not be stressed. Native speakers of English read the sentences, as expected, with low pitch on the pronouns and raised pitch on the verbs. In contrast, over half of the Japanese students (60 to 70%) typically read the sentences with higher pitch on the pronouns compared with the verbs that follow. Mori then went on to explore whether this tendency of initial high pitch applied only to pronouns, or whether it extended to other function words as well. In her second experiment, four new sentences were added for another 30 students to read, and these new sentences started with the article the and the preposition at, as well as a preposition plus an article in the, and on the, all followed by a content word. In this second experiment, it turned out that the monosyllabic prepositions and articles were not produced with an initial high pitch. So Mori next considered whether syllabic or segmental structures affected the pitch pattern in sentence-initial positions, and ran another set of


133

experiments with more variation in the syllable structure of the sentence-initial function words. For all recorded readings, she analyzed the results physically by measuring the mean F0 and the maximum and minimum F0 of vowels and nasals of the target words, and these results were tabulated each time. Results The results of Mori’s experiments showed that a significant number of Japanese students produced an initial high pitch where native speakers of English did not, in the following words: I, they, it, and you, all personal pronouns, whereas no initial high pitch was observed for the articles a and an. High pitch was sometimes found in sentence-initial prepositions such as to, at, in, on, and by but it was not as obvious as for pronouns. From her data, Mori concluded that syllable structure did not seem to be the contributing factor towards the frequency of initial high pitch: i.e., whether the vowel in the word was a short vowel or diphthong did not seem to matter, nor whether the word ended in a consonant or not. Then what factor is contributing to the difference? Mori’s conclusion is that her results indicate that syntactic category has the greatest effect on the frequency of occurrence of initial high pitch among her Japanese subjects. Mori suggests that this might be a transfer from Japanese, because in Japanese, subject pronouns, if used at all, appear at the beginning of a sentence and are accented (i.e., high pitched). Verbs in Japanese, on the other hand, usually appear at the end of the sentence, and in this position, words do not receive an accent except for focus.20 This also explains why the articles a, and an were never given a high pitch even when they were sentence initial, and why prepositions were seldom allotted a high pitch: there are simply no articles in Japanese and they are therefore not accentable, and prepositions are actually particles that appear not before, but after nouns in Japanese, and these are not accented except for contrastive focus. Here we should recall Sakamoto’s experiment, where it was found that the interrogative what at the beginning of sentences was pronounced by her subjects with high pitch, and later when asked why, the students replied that interrogatives were ‘important’ information. This phenomenon too, may be explained as interference or transfer from Japanese. In Japanese, the corresponding interrogative adjective donna, or the more formal form donoyoona that comes before a noun, and the interrogative pronoun nani

20

Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), Sugito (1996).

134

Hiroko SAITO

also appear sentence-initially:21 HLL

LLL L L HHLH

Donna shigoto ni tsukitai no? HLLLL

LL H

Donoyoona shigoto? HL L

(What job do you eventually want to have?)

(What kind of job?)

LHL H

Nani wo shitai no?

(What would you like to do?)

Notice that in Japanese, even when a noun follows the interrogative adjective, the noun loses its original accent pattern (shigoto [LHH]) and it is the high-pitched accent of the interrogative that remains. This high pitch may have been transferred to the English pronunciation, when for English, the natural pronunciation would be no stress and lower pitch for what, and a strong stress on job in the first sentence and the nucleus on kind and you in the second and third sentences respectively. Mori’s assertion when explaining transfer of Japanese high pitch to English is mainly about the transfer of prosodic characteristics in certain syntactic positions. That is, sentence-initial pronouns are high-pitched in Japanese, and this high pitch is transferred to pronouns in the same position of an English sentence. Particles that do not take up initial position in Japanese (syntactic category equivalent to English prepositions) are high-pitched neither in Japanese nor in the English read by Japanese students. Is it possible to extend the process of transfer further? It might be that the Japanese learners, when reading English aloud, think about the meaning of the words they are reading, translate the word into Japanese, then the prosodic traits of that word in Japanese are brought to mind and transferred to English prosody, as it were. The transfer is not only about the syntactic position or the position a certain syntactic category occupies in a sentence, but what prosodic feature that word has in Japanese. The indefinite article,22 which is a syntactic category that does not exist in Japanese, is ignored in the first place, but personal pronouns tend to receive more prominence (high pitch) than necessary, because when a personal pronoun is used at all in Japanese, it is contrastive in nature, and 21 22

H shows high-pitched mora, and L low-pitched mora. The Japanese examples are in standard Tokyo dialect. The English definite article the is often translated into Japanese as sono, a demonstrative adjective.


therefore accented.

135

Compare the following:

L H HHHHL

Soo omoimasu. LHH

(I think so.)

H LH HHHHL

Watashi wa soo omoimasu .

(As for me, I think so.)

As Mori also states, ‘there is a large difference between English pronouns and Japanese pronouns.’ 23 In English, subject pronouns are ‘given’ pieces of information, whilst in Japanese, the pronoun is usually ‘omitted except for emphasis or for clarification.’24 Therefore, when a pronoun is unduly stressed in English by Japanese speakers, it might affect the meaning or nuance of the utterance. Since Mori’s concern is sentence-initial pitch level, her experiment does not include negatives or auxiliary verbs. However, with the above results in mind, it might be possible to say that since the negating lexical item ~nai (not ~) in Japanese is often accented, those Japanese speakers who guessed wrongly that the word haven’t should receive the nucleus in I haven’t thought about it, may have carried this over from Japanese to English. Consider the following: LHHLL LLL

Kangaete imasu.

(I’m thinking about it.)

LHHLL LHLLL

Kangaete inaidesu.

(I haven’t thought about it.)

LHHLL LHHL

Kangaete imasen.

(I haven’t thought about it.)

Summary of the Two Experiments We have looked at two separate experiments investigating the way Japanese learners read English sentences. Through Sakamoto’s survey, we witnessed the evidence for the reason why many examinees and even English teachers thought that the function word haven’t should be the most emphasized word in a supposedly neutral reading of the sentence I haven’t thought about it, which was one of the questions on the 2002 Center Test. 23 24

Mori (2005:53). Ibid.

136

Hiroko SAITO

Another word, what, was pronounced with high pitch and consequently unduly accented by the Japanese subjects. For both haven’t and what, the students testified that these were ‘important’ words and hence should be stressed, if not given nucleus status. The other factor that became apparent from her survey was that for the first reading, Japanese students were not able to de-stress given information and move the nucleus onto a word that was new and/or contrastive against another word in the dialogue. Mori set out in her series of experiments to find out the cause behind sentence-initial high-pitch pronunciations of Japanese learners of English. It was discovered that function words were not all indiscriminately high-pitched at the beginning of a sentence: only those belonging to a particular syntactic category, namely subject pronouns, seemed to be involved. She reached the conclusion that this must be a transfer from Japanese, since Japanese subject pronouns, if used at all, appear sentence-initially and are realized with high pitch. After surveying the two different sets of experiments, the present writer suggested that findings by Sakamoto about misplacement of the intonation nucleus by Japanese students might also be explained by the kind of transfer from Japanese explored and discovered by Mori. When Japanese learners read English aloud, they think in terms of words, not larger units, and the syntactic category the word belongs to reminds them of the prosodic features the counterpart word has in Japanese. The learner then transfers this prosodic feature to their English pronunciation. This happens at both the conscious and unconscious levels,25 and even for students who are studying English at intermediate level in universities.26 4. Validity of Testing Nuclear Stress Placement This paper set out by trying to find the reason behind an English teacher’s complaint concerning the Japanese national Center Test of 2002. A question on the English exam contained an item that the teacher and his colleagues, and hence their students, had insufficient knowledge about, because it had never been taught properly in many schools in Japan, and even textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education had wrong information about it. The teacher’s first complaint, that nuclear stress placement was not 25

26

Remember that Sakamoto had the subjects ‘think’ which words to mark after they had listened to her explanation on nuclear stress placement, and moreover, she often asked the subjects the reason in cases where they misplaced stresses. These could be considered as ‘conscious’ nuclear stress placement. Both Sakamoto and Mori used university students as subjects, and these students’ English level can be considered to be above average in Japan.


137

teachable, cannot be sympathized with, because rules exist and it is not at all difficult to teach these rules. Once the basic rules and prosodic differences between English and Japanese are taught, thinking about where the nucleus should be placed and how it should be realized will help students to become aware of the syntax and the meaning of what they are trying to read, hear, or say. Jenkins (2000: 154) admits that although the receptive side (listening for the nucleus) is easier to acquire, production of appropriate accentuation takes much more time and practice. However, as was observed in Sakamoto’s experiment where production of proper nucleus placement improved dramatically after she explained the rules to the students, 27 nuclear-stress placement is indeed teachable, and once acquired, very useful. The teacher’s next complaint was that no correlation could be observed between this type of test and the rest of the exam that tested knowledge of vocabulary, idioms, and reading comprehension. The present paper was not able to delve into this problem, but would suggest that this may partly be because the rules of nucleus placement, that is, knowing exactly what is meant by putting ‘emphasis’ on words, and knowing what to look for in a sentence, has not been taught up until now, and that is why this type of test showed no correlation between questions concerning vocabulary and grammar which are being taught in the classroom and for which the examinees had prepared. The third complaint by Mr. Ikegami was that being able to answer this type of question had no correlation to the test-taker’s actual pronunciation of English, and therefore the test was not valid. Let us consider this last topic at this stage. Tara and Taniguchi (2004) also found through experiment that firstly, results of indirect tests, i.e. tests asking about stress placement on paper, do not predict the student’s ability of proper sentence-stress placement in real speech. Secondly, they also found that a student whose general ability of English was high did not necessarily score high on direct tests (reading out dialogues) or on indirect tests (marking sentence stress on paper). Therefore, they concluded, it was of extreme importance that a student’s ability to produce appropriate sentence stress should always be ascertained by the teacher actually listening to the student, and not by paper-and-pencil tests. It seems that Tara and Taniguchi’s tests were carried out without any explanations or lectures on nuclear-stress placement rules, although their subjects were their students in the English Department at a university, and 27

See results in figure 1.

138

Hiroko SAITO

there may have been phonetics lectures at some point before the experiment. The second part of their findings, that is, that students with high scores on general tests of English did not necessarily score high on indirect or direct tests of sentence-stress placement, matches the complaint made by Mr. Ikegami, and the same suggestion as to him can be repeated here: that the reason for a lack of correlation may be because intonation and nuclear-stress placement have hardly been taught at school, and students are simply not aware of what is involved in this kind of test, direct, or indirect. The present writer agrees with Tara and Taniguchi on the importance of the teacher being able to judge objectively the ability of proper stressing and accenting of their students so that they do not have to depend on paper-and-pencil tests. In Sakamoto’s experiment, it was also found that there was no correlation between what the students marked on paper and how they realized the dialogues,28 and among both Sakamoto and Mori’s subjects, there were cases where a word was pronounced with an unduly high pitch but which did not have a pitch change and therefore was not the nucleus—such a phenomenon would not have revealed itself on an indirect test. And yet, there was a dramatic improvement in the production skills of the students after they learned about nuclear-stress placement, and this proves that this aspect of prosody is teachable and when acquired, a valid skill for efficient communication. References Abe, I. 1962. Eigo intoneeshon no kenkyuu (A Study of English Intonation). Tokyo: Kenkyusha Shuppan. Abe, I. 1972. Nichiei intoneeshon hou (Principles of Japanese and English Intonation). Tokyo: Gakushoboo Shuppan. Cruttenden, A. 1990. “Nucleus Placement and Three Classes of Exception”. In S. Ramasaran (ed.) Studies in the Pronunciation of English. London: Routledge. . 1997. Intonation 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culicover, P. and M. Rochemont. 1983. “Stress and Focus in English”. Language Vol.59, No.1: 123-165. Gussenhoven, C. 2004. The Phonology of Tone and Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ikegami, H. 2002a. “Sentaashiken wa seito no eigoryoku wo kentei shitaka (Did the Center Test Test the Ability of English of Students?)”. Eigo Kyouiku (English Education) Vol. 51, No. 1: 86-87. Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten. 28

See the graph in figure 1.


139

. 2002b. “Sentaashiken wa seito no eigoryoku wo kentei shitaka (sono 2) (Did the Center Test Test Ability of English of Students? Part 2)”. Eigo Kyouiku (English Education) Vol. 51, No.7 : 82-83. Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten. Jenkins, J. 2000. The Phonology of English as an International Language: New models, new norms, new goals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kasashima, J. et al. 2004. New Horizon English Course 1. Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki. Ladd, R. 1996. Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mori, Y. 2005. “The Initial High Pitch in English Sentences Produced by Japanese Speakers”. English Linguistics 22:23-55. Pierrehumbert, J.B. and M.E. Beckman. 1988. Japanese Tone Structure. Cambridge: MIT Press. Saito, H. 2002a. “‘Sentaashiken wa seito no eigoryoku wo kentei shitaka’ wo yonde (Upon Reading ‘Did the Center Test Test Ability of English of Students?’)”. Eigo Kyouiku (English Education) Vol. 51, No. 5: 81-82. Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten. . 2002b. “‘Sentaashiken wa seito no eigoryoku wo kentei shitaka sono 2’ nitsuite (On ‘Did the Center Test Test Ability of English of Students? Part 2’)”. Eigo Kyouiku (English Education) Vol. 51, No. 11:86-87. Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten. Sakamoto, A. 2005. “Nihonjin no eigo intoneeshon: Yomi to shirushizuke no ryouhou ni okeru kaku no ichi no keikou (English Intonation of Japanese Speakers: Tendency of nucleus placement in both readings and markings)”. Unpublished graduation thesis submitted to the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in partial fulfilment of the degree, Bachelor of Arts. Sugito, M. 1996. Nihonjin no eigo (English of the Japanese). Osaka: Izumi Shoin. Takebayashi, S. 1996. Eigo onseigaku (English Phonetics). Tokyo: Kenkyusha. Tara, S. and M. Taniguchi. 2004. “Bun kyousei wo tesuto suru: bun kyousei ni kansuru chokusetsu tesuto to kansetsu tesuto (Testing Tests on Sentence Accent: Direct tests and indirect tests on placement of sentence accent)”. Preprints for the Fifth Meeting of The English Phonetic Society of Japan. Tench, P. 1996. The Intonation Systems of English. London: Cassell. Toivanen, J. 2003. “Tone Choice in the English Intonation of Proficient Non-native Speakers”. PHONUM 9. Watanabe, K. 1994. Eigo intoneeshon ron (On English Intonation). Tokyo: Kenkyusha Shuppan

Mismatch of Stress and Accent in Spoken Spanish Takuya KIMURA 1. Introduction In this paper I will discuss the relations between lexical stresses and pitch movements in spoken Spanish, paying special attention to the cases where the stresses and the pitch accents do not coincide. Then I will argue that some of the assumptions which seem to be widely agreed upon in the current Sp-ToBI framework should be revised. In the next section the two terms ‘stress’ and ‘accent’ will be defined. In Section 3 the Spanish version of the ToBI framework, which is considered to be the de facto standard of prosodic representations, will briefly be explained. Sections 4 and 5 show some examples of stress-accent mismatch ― stresses without accent, and accents without stress ― observed in spoken Spanish. In Section 6 two examples will be given to demonstrate that the combination of tones H*+L H%, whose existence has been denied in the literature, really exists. In Section 7 some concluding remarks will be given. 2. Definitions I will use the term ‘stress’ to refer to lexical stresses. As is well known, Spanish is one of the so-called free stress languages, which means that the position of the stressed syllable can differ from word to word and that different stress positions cause changes in the meaning: e.g. término “end (noun)” / termino “I end” / terminó “s/he ended”.1 Stress by itself is an abstract property which does not have any particular phonetic realization. In connected speech a stressed syllable is pronounced with some prominence in terms of pitch, loudness and/or duration, and the pitch is also the realization of intonation pattern. In other words, the intonation pattern and the location of the stresses are combined and determine the way the stressed syllables are realized. In this paper I will use the term ‘accent’ to refer to a pitch prominence 1

The underlined syllables are stressed. Many of the function words (prepositions, conjunctions, definite articles, etc.) are unstressed in connected speech, and therefore have no stressed syllables.

142

Takuya KIMURA

which appears on higher pitch than pronounced with a be, for example, possibilities).3

a stress.2 If a stressed syllable is pronounced with a the preceding syllable and the following syllable is lower pitch than the stressed one, there is considered to an H*+L pitch accent (although there are other

3. Sp-ToBI “ToBI” is the abbreviation for ‘Tones and Break Indices’. The ToBI Website (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/) explains what ToBI is as follows: “ToBI is a framework for developing community-wide conventions for transcribing the intonation and prosodic structure of spoken utterances in a language variety. A ToBI framework system for a language variety is grounded in careful research on the intonation system and the relationship between intonation and the prosodic structures of the language (e.g., tonally marked phrases and any smaller prosodic constituents that are distinctively marked by other phonological means).” The ToBI system is not universal, so each language (or each dialect) needs its own system.4 Sp-ToBI is the ToBI system developed for Spanish, and its details can be seen on the Sp-ToBI Website: (http://www.ling.ohiostate.edu/~tobi/sp-tobi/spanish.html).5 Figure 1 is an example of the application of Sp-ToBI on a real utterance, copied from the Sp-ToBI Website. The graph is divided into five tiers. The tier at the top shows the wave form. The second tier, called the tone tier, contains the pitch accents and the boundary tones that have been analyzed to be there.6 The third tier is called ‘the word tier’, where the 2

3 4

5

6

This sort of stress / accent distinction is essential in the ToBI framework, treated in the following sections, but its origin can be found in some pre-ToBI works, such as Cruttenden (1986:21). “H” and “L” mean “high” and “low”, respectively. The asterisk “*” means that the tone is associated with a stressed syllable. The ToBI Website puts the following note: “ToBI is not an International Phonetic Alphabet for prosody. Because intonation and prosodic organization differ from language to language, and often from dialect to dialect within a language, there are many different ToBI systems, each one specific to a language variety and the community of researchers working on that language variety.” (The boldface is original.) This site is incomplete and has not been updated since October 13, 1999. Its content is based on the consensus that emerged from the first Sp-ToBI Workshop, held in October 1999. The second Sp-ToBI Workshop was held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on June 22, 2005, but its results have not appeared. "L%" on the tone tier indicates a low boundary tone. A boundary tone appears at the end of an intonation phrase. An asterisk "*" without tone mark means compression, which is the lack of a pitch accent in a word in which we would expect to have one. In this example, the noun número loses the pitch accent because of the contrastive narrow focus on the verb dieron. “!H” denotes a downstepped (i.e. phonologically lowered) high tone.

Mismatch of Stress and Accent

143

uttered sentence is spelt out orthographically and the end timing of each word is indicated. The fourth tier shows the end timing of each stressed syllable. In the bottom part of the graph the fundamental frequency is shown by a dotted line. The only pitch accent present in this example is L+H*, which appears three times. Indeed, the inventory of the pitch accents admitted in the Sp-ToBI Website is remarkably small: L*+H, L+H*, H+L* and H*. Sosa (2003:189) admits only three basic pitch accents for Spanish: L*+H, L+H* and H+L*; when it is difficult to identify an stressed syllable as either of the three pitch accents, Sosa recommends using the labels “H*” or “*” provisionally, and reanalyzing it after a better understanding of the pitch accent inventory is obtained. Beckman et al. (2002:33) share the same opinion. I do not agree with them and I think it is necessary to include other pitch accents, such as H*+L, in the inventory of Spanish pitch accents. I will return to this point in Section 6.

Figure 1.

Sp-ToBI transcription of the underlined part of Dices que le pidieron el número del vuelo. No, que le dieron el número del vuelo. “You say he was asked the flight number. No, he was given the flight number.” Copied from http://www.ling. ohio-state.edu/~tobi/sp-tobi/compress

144

Takuya KIMURA

4. Stress without Accent We have already seen in the previous section an example of a stress without accent: in the utterance shown in Figure 1, the stress on the first syllable of the word número does not carry any pitch prominence. In this section we will see another type of lack of accent on a stressed syllable, often observed in the utterances of wh-questions. In Spanish, all the interrogatives are lexically stressed. But there are abundant tokens of utterances of wh-questions where the interrogative does not carry any pitch prominence. Figures 2 and 3 give us two examples of this phenomenon.7

Figure 2.

7

Waveform and pitch curve of ¿A dónde vas? “Where are you going?” taken from the TUFS Spanish Conversation Module, es01.wav

These two examples are taken from the TUFS Spanish Conversation Module. The audiovisual files are available on http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/modules/es/dmod/. All the graphs on this paper, except Figure 1, are outputs from the software “SUGI Speech Analyzer Ver.1.07” (Animo Corporation:1999).


Figure 3.

145

Waveform and pitch curve of ¿Qué vas a hacer este verano? “What are you going to do this summer?” taken from the TUFS Spanish Conversation Module, es10.wav

What is striking in these examples is a marked pitch rise on the last stressed syllables: vas in Figure 2, and -ra- in Figure 3. In Figure 3 the pitch lowers at the end of the utterance, while in Figure 2 the lowering does not occur since the stressed vas is the very last syllable of the utterance. Another remarkable point is that, in the utterance of Figure 3, none of the non-final stresses carry any pitch prominence.8 This overall pitch pattern ― consisting of an initial interrogative without accent, following non-final stressed syllables without accent, and an abrupt rising on the last stressed syllable ― is widely found in wh-questions in colloquial style spoken Spanish. 5. Accent without Stress 5.1. HLH* Tone In this section I will show some examples of a peculiar tone pattern widely observed in formal style spoken Spanish, explicitly treated for the first time in Kimura (1992). This phenomenon consists of a high pitch on a pre-pre-tonic syllable,9 usually followed by a lower pitch on the pre-tonic, returning to a high pitch on the tonic. When the tonic is not the last syllable of the word, the high pitch of the tonic continues until the end of the word. 8 9

The stresses are on the underlined syllables: ¿Qué vas a hacer este verano? Here I am using the term ‘tonic’ to refer to the lexically stressed syllable. Thus, in the case of the word dependientas, whose stressed syllable is -dien-, the pre-pre-tonic is the first syllable de-.

146

Takuya KIMURA

I will call this the ‘HLH* tone’.10 This tone is observed in spoken Spanish of a more or less formal style, especially, but not exclusively, in TV news programmes, in politicians’ speeches, etc. The frequency of use of this tone varies much from speaker to speaker, but there is a constant tendency for this tone pattern to appear immediately before some sort of syntactic boundary (but never sentence-finally). The longer and the more complicated the sentence is, the more likely this tone pattern is to appear in the utterance. Therefore I consider this tone to have a function of marking a syntactic boundary within a sentence.11 Figures 4-8 are five examples of the HLH* tone. All these examples have been taken from the NHK Radio Spanish Course (Intermediate Level, January to March, 1992).12 The sentences are read by a female speaker from Zaragoza, Spain. Figures 4 and 5 are taken from the recording of sentence (1), which is a part of a situation-vacant advertisement. Figures 6-8 are from sentence (2), a weather forecast. The lexically stressed syllables are indicated by underlining, and the syllables in boldface italic are the pre-pre-tonic syllables pronounced with a high tone in the recorded material.

10

11 12

(1)

Cámper para atender a su fuerte y dinámica expansión comercial desea contratar dependientes y dependientas para incorporarlos a su red de establecimientos en Madrid. “Cámper (name of a Spanish shoemaking company), in order to deal with its strong and dynamic commercial expansion, wants to take on salesmen and saleswomen, to incorporate them in its chain stores in Madrid.”

(2)

Altas presiones en el resto del país, con un anticiclón muy fuerte situado al noroeste de Irlanda y que se extiende por el centro de Europa y el Mediterráneo. “High pressures in the rest of the country, with a very strong anticyclone located to the Northwest of Ireland and expanding

Formerly I called this phenomenon a ‘pseudoaccent’ (niseakusento in Japanese) as in Kimura (1992, 1998). My colleagues and I have abandoned this term, for, based on the definitions given in Section 2 of this paper, it can indeed be considered an accent. For the present, however, we refrain from calling it an ‘HLH* pitch accent’ either, since the current Sp-ToBI framework does not admit the existence of tritonal pitch accents. See Section 7 of this paper on this point. Incidentally, I represent this tone without plus signs “+”, instead of writing “H+L+H*”. This is just for the sake of simplicity. See Kimura et al. (2005) for details. NHK stands for Nippon Hôsô Kyôkai “Japan Broadcasting Corporation”. The teacher in charge of the intermediate level was Professor Norikazu Akiyama (Tamagawa University).


147

toward Central Europe and the Mediterranean.”

Figure 4.

Waveform and pitch curve of the part dependientes y dependientas “salesmen and saleswomen” in (1), taken from the NHK Radio Spanish Course cassette tape.

Figure 5.

Waveform and pitch curve of the part para incorporarlos “to incorporate them” in (1), taken from the NHK Radio Spanish Course cassette tape.

148

Takuya KIMURA

Figure 6.

Waveform and pitch curve of the part en el resto del país “in the rest of the country” in (2), taken from the NHK Radio Spanish Course cassette tape.

Figure 7.

Waveform and pitch curve of the part situado al noroeste de Irlanda “located to the Northwest of Ireland” in (2), taken from the NHK Radio Spanish Course cassette tape.


Figure 8.

149

Waveform and pitch curve of the part y que se extiende por el centro de Europa “and expanding toward Central Europe” in (2), taken from the NHK Radio Spanish Course cassette tape.

In Figure 4 we observe a high pitch on the pre-pre-tonic de- of the word dependientas, followed by a lower pre-tonic -pen-. The stressed -dien- and the following unstressed -tas are pronounced once again on a high pitch, and the height of these two syllables are almost the same. This is a typical occurrence of the HLH* tone. Figure 5 shows another typical example of this tone. Here the pre-pre-tonic -cor- of the word incorporarlos is pronounced with a strikingly higher pitch than the preceding syllables. The rising from the pre-tonic -poto the tonic -rar- is not very clear on the graph, but, when we listen to it, a clear rising is observed. Figures 6-8 are also examples of the same tone, but with some peculiarities. In Figure 6 the pre-pre-tonic syllable pronounced with a high pitch is del, the contracted form of the preposition de and the definite article el. This is a function word and therefore it is lexically unstressed. In this utterance this unstressed word receives a high pitch because it happens to be in a pre-pre-tonic position, being located before a word whose second syllable is stressed: país. The utterance shown in Figure 8 is a similar example in that an unstressed function word ― the relative pronoun que in this case ― receives a high pitch. The reflexive pronoun se (also unstressed) and the first (unstressed) syllable of the following verb extiende are merged into only one syllable by synaloepha, putting the preceding que into the pre-pre-tonic position to where it has to receive a high pitch in this tone. The stressed

150

Takuya KIMURA

syllable -tien- and the last -de are pronounced with a higher pitch than the preceding part: se ex-.13 Something contrary is happening in the example of Figure 7. Here the initial si- of the word situado is on the high pitch even though it is immediately before the stressed syllable. Orthographically this word is considered trisyllabic: si-tua-do, the second being stressed and containing a rising diphthong /wa/. However, considering the long and stable realization of the [u] vowel, it is more reasonable to think that this word is here pronounced as tetrasyllabic: si-tu-a-do, the third syllable being stressed, thus the first syllable si- receives the pre-pre-tonic position and consequently a high pitch. Notice that in all these examples there is a syntactic boundary, minor as it may be, immediately after the HLH* tone. 5.2. H* on an unstressed syllable? Let us go on to see another case in which there seems to be an accent on an unstressed syllable. The utterance of Figure 9 is from the CD accompanying a SpanishJapanese dictionary.14 This utterance begins with the word préstame “lend me”, of which the last syllable -me is an indirect object pronoun suffixed to the imperative verb form, and it is naturally unstressed. But we observe a typical realization of the H* tone accent on this last syllable, followed by a boundary L%. Attention must be drawn to the duration of this syllable. It is pronounced as long as, or even longer than, the stressed syllables. There must be some postlexical mechanism which gives an accent to lexically unstressed syllables under certain conditions.

13

14

These two examples (of Figures 6 and 8) clearly indicate that this tone is a postlexical phenomenon, since lexically unstressed words are given a high pitch because of a stress in the following word. By the same token, we must not think that the syllables de- in dependientas and -cor- in incorporarlos have secondary stresses. Kenkyûsha Shin Supeingo Jiten CD-ban Hatsuon to Intonêshon [Pronunciation and Intonation in CD for Kenkyusha’s New Spanish Dictionary] (1992), Tokyo. Kenkyusha.


Figure 9.

151

Waveform and pitch curve of the utterance of the sentence: Préstame siquiera mil pesetas. “Lend me at least a thousand pesetas.” taken from the CD Kenkyûsha Shin Supeingo Jiten CD-ban Hatsuon to Intonêshon [Pronunciation and Intonation in CD for Kenkyusha’s New Spanish Dictionary] (1992), Tokyo. Kenkyusha.

6. H*+L H% As we saw in Section 3, the active investigators of Sp-ToBI, like Sosa (2003:189) and Beckman et al. (2002:33), admit only a limited number of pitch accents in Spanish. They consistently deny the existence of a H*+L tone accent. Sosa, in his book in 1999, had admitted more variety of accents. He said that H*, L*, H*+L, H+L*, L*+H, L+H*, H*+H and H+H* were all possible in Spanish as prenuclear accents, but that in nuclear positions H*+L and H+H* were impossible (Sosa 1999:133).15 And on the previous page he strongly denies the possibility of a tone sequence H*+L H% in Spanish. After presenting an inventory of eleven possible combinations of nuclear accents and boundary tones,16 he argues: “Other three possible tonematic combinations would be as follows: the sequence H*+L H%, which would give a fall-rise toneme, similar to that of English. We have not found any 15

16

A ‘nuclear accent’ is an accent that appears at the end of an intonation phrase, immediately before a boundary tone. All the preceding accents in the intonation phrase are ‘prenuclear accents’. A nuclear accent and a boundary tone are combined and constitute a ‘toneme’. The list of the possible combinations Sosa presents is as follows: 1. Falling: H* L%, L* L%, H+L* L%, L+H* L%, H+H* L%. 2. Rising: H* H%, L* H%, H+L* H%, L+H* H%, L*+H H%. 3. Level: H*+H L%.

152

Takuya KIMURA

example of this contour in our sample, and we can say that at least in the dialects known to us, there do not seem to be clear contexts in which it could be used grammatically. Put in other words, we think that its absence is not accidental, but it reflects a peculiarity of Spanish intonation.” (Sosa 1999:132)17 In this section I will demonstrate that, in spite of Sosa’s negative remark, Spanish does have the sequence H*+L H% in the inventory of the possible contours. Figure 10 is taken from a Spanish course for beginners, broadcast on Japanese TV, where a Spanish male speaker and a Bolivian female speaker pronounce alternately the Spanish numerals from zero to ten.18 Notice that in each utterance by the Spanish male speaker, the pitch is rather high at the beginning, it dips a little, and then it shows a rapid rising. This contour should be analyzed as an H*L tone accent plus H% boundary tone.19 Let us examine another example in Figure 11. This is taken from a scene in a Spanish movie, where a little girl says “You were with Rosa.” to another, and then suddenly a third girl asks “With Rosa?” surprisedly. The contour of the last word Rosa should be regarded as a realization of H*L H%, as can be seen in the graph.

17

18 19

The original is as follows: “Otras tres combinaciones tonemáticas posibles serían las siguientes: la secuencia H*+L H%, que daría un tonema descendente-ascendente, análogo al fall-rise del inglés. No hemos encontrado ejemplos de ese contorno en nuestra muestra, y podemos decir que al menos en los dialectos que conocemos, no parece haber contextos claros en los cuales podría usarse gramaticalmente. Dicho en otras palabras, creemos que su ausencia no es contingencial, sino que refleja una peculiaridad entonativa del español.” I ignore the other two possibilities Sosa mentions as irrelevant here. In the original recording there was a longer pause between each utterance of a numeral. I removed large parts of the pauses before analyzing it. I represent the tone H*L without the plus sign “+”, but it is the same thing as H*+L Sosa mentions. See also note 10.


153

Figure 10. Waveform and pitch curve of ― Cero, ― Cero, ― uno, ― uno, ― dos, ― dos, ― tres, ― tres,... “― Zero, ― Zero, ― one, ― one, ― two, ― two, ― three, ― three,...” pronounced alternately by a Spanish male speaker and a Bolivian female speaker, taken from the NHK TV Spanish Conversation Programme.

Figure 11. Waveform and pitch curve of the dialogue: ― Con Rosa has estado. ― ¿Con Rosa? “― You were with Rosa. ― With Rosa?” by two little Spanish girls in the Spanish movie Cría cuervos (1976).

154

Takuya KIMURA

7. Concluding remarks We have seen a number of examples of Spanish utterances that are difficult to interpret within the current Sp-ToBI framework, proposed by Sosa (2003) and Beckman et al. (2002). Based on what we have seen we may conclude that at least the following two points should be taken into account for the theory to fit the reality of Spanish prosody. Firstly, we should not limit the number of possible accents too much. Certainly one of the purposes for which these notations were invented was to make the hidden rules visible, reducing apparently chaotic phenomena to a set of a limited number of units. So it is right to avoid an unnecessary increase of the descriptive units. But at the same time we always have to be aware that there is a danger of putting too much weight on descriptive simplicity, missing important linguistic / phonetic facts. At least the accent H*L arguably is a member of the inventory of the Spanish pitch accents. Secondly, some new mechanism must be devised to explain such cases as the HLH* tone demonstrated in Section 5.1. There are two possible solutions to this problem: (1) to assign a starred tone postlexically to an unstressed syllable under certain conditions; (2) to admit the existence of tritonal accents like HLH*. Either of these two solutions would mean a drastic change in the theoretical framework of the ToBI system, but Hualde (2003) advocates the second possibility when he says: “In addition to the notations given, there exist other possibilities like H+H* (used in some analyses of English) and the existence of tritonal accents (like, for example, L+H*+L) is not necessarily excluded either, though it has not been used in any of the languages analyzed so far in this model.”20 (Hualde. 2003: 164) Acknowledgement I wish to thank Takehiko Makino(Chuo University) for reading the draft and making a number of helpful comments and suggestions. References Beckman, M.E., M. Díaz-Campos, J.T. McGory, T.A. Morgan. 2002. “Intonation across Spanish, in the Tones and Break Indices framework”. Probus 14.9-36. Cruttenden, A. 1986. Intonation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hualde, J.I. 2003. “El modelo métrico y autosegmental [Autosegmental 20

The original is as follows: “Además de las notaciones dadas existen otras posibilidades como H+H* (empleado en algunos análisis del inglés) y la existencia de acentos tritonales (como, por ejemplo, L+H*+L) no está tampoco necesariamente excluida, aunque no se haya utilizado en ninguna de las lenguas analizadas hasta ahora en este modelo.”


155

Metrical Model]”, Chapter 6 of Prieto (coord.) 2003. Kimura, T. 1992. “Supeingo no aratamatta hatsuwa ni mirareru genshou ni tsuite [ – a Phenomenon Observed in Spanish Formal Utterances]”. Hispanica 36.76-88. Kimura, T. 1998. “Kyousei no fuyo to sono jitsugen – kara manaberu koto [Stress Assignment and Its Realization – Case Studies on ]”. Hispanica 42.1-12. Kimura, T., H. Sensui and A. Toyomaru. 2005. “Relaciones entre el tono HLH* y la pausa –Un estudio fonético sobre noticias leídas- [Relations between HLH* Tone and Pause –A Phonetic Study on News Reading-]”. Hispanica 49. (The) Ohio State University Department of Linguistics. 1999. ToBI, http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ Prieto, P. (coord.) 2003: Teorías de la entonación [Intonation Theories], Barcelona: Ariel. Sosa, J.M. 1999. La entonación del español [Spanish Intonation], Madrid: Cátedra. Sosa, J.M. 2003. “La notación tonal del español en el modelo Sp-ToBI [Spanish Tonal Notation in the Sp-ToBI Model]”, Chapter 7 of Prieto (coord.) 2003. Tevis McGory, J. and M. Díaz-Campos. 1999. Sp-ToBI (Spanish Tones and Break Indices), http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/sp-tobi/spanish.html

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb — How Morphology and Phonology Interact — Joaquim Brandão de CARVALHO

1. Introduction Since the advent of generative grammar, phonology has long been assumed to be a mere interpretative component of the grammar. As such, the phonological module has been viewed as a unidirectional algorithm ‘translating’ the underlying representations supplied by the syntax and the lexicon into phonetic surface forms. Thereby, as opposed to the old structuralist postulate of ‘separation of levels’, phonological rules can be sensitive to morphological information, phonology being at liberty to work, but, so to speak, under a legal restraint, and always likely to obey orders given by the morphosyntactic core of the grammar. However, the last twelve years have seen an interesting drift. If Optimality theory (henceforth OT) can be said to have brought any real welcome evolution in phonological research, this might follow from its focusing on a bidirectional relationship between phonology and morphosyntax. Indeed, much in the line of the neogrammarian views on the interaction of phonetic and analogical changes, OT assumes that surface forms result from the possibly conflicting interplay of phonological constraints proper such as ONSET, NO-CODA, etc., and of constraints which refer to the morphemic structure of words, such as ALIGN and FAITHFULNESS in the earlier versions of the theory (cf., for example, McCarthy & Prince 1994). In what follows, I wish to show that the structure of inflectional paradigms may be based on the exploitation of phonology by morphology, whereby morphological markedness uses stress placement and phonological markedness in order to build a five-degree scale of the complexity of inflected forms. This will be illustrated by the ‘weak’ and productive verbal paradigms of Portuguese. Should such facts be corroborated by additional evidence from other languages, interactions of this kind might be viewed as strong arguments for the non-interpretative status of phonology in linguistic theory. The article is organized as follows. In § 2, I will recall Carvalho’s

158

Joaquim Brandão de CARVALHO

(1989) arguments for quantity-sensitive stress in Portuguese. In § 3, following on from Carvalho (2004), it will be shown how syllabic quantity is used by morphology within a two-mora dissyllabic template characterizing the unmarked forms of the verb. In § 4, it will be seen how this phonologically-based constraint (henceforth Ph-constraint) interacts with an independent morphological constraint (M-constraint) on stress placement, in such a way that all inflected forms of the verb can be ranked within a markedness scale according to violation of either constraint. The conclusion (§ 5) will deal with the type of relationship between phonology and morphology that this interaction suggests; as will be seen, it ultimately diverges from both SPE- and OT-based views. 2. The basis of the Ph-constraint : quantity-sensitive stress In European Portuguese (henceforth EP), vowels generally undergo a process of reduction in unstressed syllables, which is described and exemplified in (1): (1)

a.

/i/ /e/ /E/ g 0g1 [i] [ ´]

b.

Tonic / pretonic alternations: [i] ↔ [i] tiro / tirar ´ [e] ↔ [ ] meto / meter [E] ↔ [´] levo / levar [a] ↔ [å] bato / bater [O] ↔ [ú] voto / votar [o] ↔ [ú] cozo / cozer [u] ↔ [ú] furo / furar

‘I / to take off’ ‘I / to put’ ‘I / to take away’ ‘I / to strike’ ‘I / to vote’ ‘I / to cook’ ‘I / to form a hole’

Tonic / post-tonic internal alternations: [i] ↔ [i] suplica / súplica ´ [E] ↔ [ ] hospede / hóspede [a] ↔ [å] naufrago / náufrago [O] ↔ [ú] ancora / âncora [u] ↔ [ú] macula / mácula

‘he implores’ / ‘request’ ‘he house’ (subj.) / ‘host’ ‘I wreck’ / ‘shipwrecked’ ‘he anchors’ / ‘anchor’ ‘he maculates’ / ‘spot’

c.

d.

/a/ g å []

/O/

/o/ /u/ 0g1 [ u]

Tonic / post-tonic final alternations: [a] ↔ [å] matar / mata ‘to kill’ / ‘he kills’, ‘kill!’ [e] ↔ [´] comer / come ‘to eat’ / ‘he eats’, ‘eat!’ [i] ↔ [´] ferir / fere ‘to wound’ / ‘he wounds’, ‘wound!’

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb

159

Now, two points are to be outlined. Firstly, unstressed vowel reduction takes place in syllabic rhymes of the type /V(s)/ and, in pretonic position, /Vr/, but fails to occur when the vowel is associated to a nasal element (henceforth /VN/), or is followed either by a glide or by /-l/ or, word-finally, by /-r/. 1 Secondly, word-final /V(s)/-rhymes are generally unstressed, as exemplified in (2a), while diphthongs, /VN/, /Vr/ and /Vl/-rhymes are normally stressed in word-final position, as illustrated in (2b). (2)

a.

Paroxytones: cola soma alta molhe figo

‘glue’ ‘sum’ ‘high’ (fem.) ‘mole’ ‘fig’

b.

Oxytones: colar pomar altar colher vigor

‘collar’ ‘orchard’ ‘altar’ ‘spoon’ ‘strength’

casa pomba porra corte lenço

‘house’ ‘pigeon’ ‘mace’ ‘court’ ‘handkerchief’

casal pombal corral cordel lençol

‘couple’ ‘pigeonry’ ‘corral’ ‘string’ ‘sheet’

erva pera erma vale

‘grass’ ‘pear’ ‘deserted’ (fem.) ‘valley’

carvão verão irmão, irmã além

‘coal’ ‘summer’ ‘brother, sister’ ‘beyond’

casas porras cortes lenços

‘houses’ ‘maces’ ‘courts’ ‘handkerchiefs’

casais corrais cordéis lençóis

‘couples’ ‘corrals’ ‘strings’ ‘sheets’

In other words, two classes of syllables can be defined in EP: one is 1

Note that /s, r, l, y, w/ and nasality (nasal diphthongs such as [å)w)] and [e)y)], spelled -ão / -am and -em respectively, being also possible) are the only phonological objects which can be added to the vowel within the rhyme, /s/ being the only possible obstruent allowed in coda position (leaving aside loanwords, namely those borrowed from Latin and Greek). Concerning the variable role of /r/, I will assume here that it follows from its being a ‘true’ coda word-internally, as is syllable-final /s/ in all positions, while it actually behaves as an onset preceding an empty nucleus word-finally. Indeed, final /r/, unlike final /s/, currently triggers vowel epenthesis : cf. cantar[´] ‘to sing’. Nevertheless, final /Vr/-sequences will be seen as tautosyllabic in what follows.

160


both likely to undergo reduction, and generally unable to attract stress word-finally; the other shows the opposite behaviour. Following on from an idea originally formulated by Lüdtke (1953), Carvalho (1989) suggested that these properties characterize a type of syllabic weight, where the distinction between full and reduced vocalism plays the same role as vowel length in Classical Latin, syllables that can undergo the process in (1a) being ‘light’ while those that cannot are ‘heavy’. The accentual patterns of (2a,b) depend, thus, on whether the last syllable is light or heavy respectively. Hence, assuming, in the line of most research in generative phonology, that syllable weight can always be expressed in quantitative terms, stress can be said to fall in EP on the penultimate mora of the word. This naturally accounts for the long-recognised ‘unmarked’ character of paroxytones in Portuguese, which, as is shown in (3), are but a particular case of a more general pattern also comprising oxytones. (The stressed mora is in bold.): (3)

Unmarked stress pattern: /µ2 µ1/ a. µ2 µ1 g g …σ σ

b.

µ2 µ1 g1 …σ

However, EP differs from Latin in that the former shows many exceptions to this unified pattern. As illustrated in (4), such words are either proparoxytones, if their last syllable is light, or paroxytones, if their last syllable is heavy: (4)

2

a.

Proparoxytones: púcaro(s) ‘pot’ estômago(s) ‘stomach’ ótimo(s) ‘excellent’ pálpebra(s) ‘eyelid’ vínculo(s) ‘link’ histórico(s) ‘historical’ abóbora(s) ‘gourd’ cátedra(s) ‘chair’ mácula(s) ‘spot’ tráfego(s) ‘traffic’ súplica(s) ‘request’ hóspede(s) ‘host’

b.

Marked paroxytones: 2 açúcar ‘sugar’ alcácer ‘castle’ Vítor ‘Victor’ Setúbal possível álcol

(toponym) ‘possible’ ‘alcohol’

sótão órfão, órfã homem

‘attic’ ‘orphan’ ‘man’

The oral post-tonic vowels in (4b), which resist reduction, are realized as slightly open ([a E O]) in standard EP.

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb náufrago(s) âncora(s)

‘shipwrecked’ ‘anchor’

fáceis possíveis

161

‘esay’ (pl.) ‘possible’ (pl.)

Thus, stress may also, and exceptionally, fall on the antepenultimate mora:3 (5)

Marked stress pattern: /µ3 µ2 µ1/ a. µ3 µ2 µ1 g g g …σ σ σ

b.

µ3 g …σ

µ2 µ1 g1 σ

That the patterns in (2) are unmarked, in EP, vis-à-vis those in (4) follows firstly from statistics, paroxytones ending in /V(s)/ and oxytones undoubtedly representing the vast majority of the lexicon, though I am not aware of any existing study on that matter. Furthermore, there are numerous phenomena of dialectal and/or diachronic variation that affect only the marked patterns in (5a,b), and turn them into the unmarked pattern in (3a), while the converse case is not attested. Consider, for example, the facts in (6): (6)

3

a.

cântaro víbora abóbora córrego paciência família côdea tábua

> > > > > > > >

dial. cantro dial. vibra dial. abobra dial. corgo dial. paciença dial. familha dial. coida dial. tauba

‘pitcher’ ‘viper’ ‘gourd’ ‘gully’ ‘patience’ ‘family’ ‘crust’ ‘board’

truncation ” ” ” ” assimilation metathesis ”

b.

homem viagem órfã sótão

> > > >

dial. home dial. viage dial. orfa dial. soto

‘man’ denasalization ‘journey’ ” ‘orphan’ (fem.) ” ‘attic’ ”

fáceis possíveis

> >

dial. faces dial. possives

‘easy’ (pl.) ‘possible’ (pl.)

contraction ”

The few oxytonic words ending in /V(s)/ (most of which are loanwords), such as café, paxá, Pará, rapaz, cortês, etc., fall into the (2b)-category, and should be given the same explanation as the rare exceptions to reduction of pretonic /V(s)/-rhymes (Carvalho 1994): all components of their final vowel are lexically associated; thereby, the syllable cannot undergo vowel reduction, and is therefore heavy.

162

Joaquim Brandão de CARVALHO cadáver > condestável >

dial. cadavre ‘corpse’ arch. condestabre ‘counstable’

metathesis ”

Finally, the inflectional morphology of Portuguese brings a third piece of evidence for the existence of an unmarked bimoraic stress pattern, as is revealed by the mechanism of verbal metaphony. 3. The Ph-constraint: the bimoraic template 3.1. One striking feature of the Portuguese verbal morphology (Harris 1974, López 1979, Redenbarger 1981, Quicoli 1990, Wetzels 1995, Carvalho 2004) is that the last vowel of the root undergoes, in the 2nd and 3rd regular conjugations (cf., e.g., meter, comer and ferir, tossir), a metaphonic alternation which: (a) depends on the nature of the thematic vowels /e/ and /i/ respectively; and (b) affects the 1st person of the present indicative and all the present subjunctive forms. This is illustrated in (7), where the 1st conjugation (levar, morar) is added for comparative purposes:4 (7)

4

a.

levar ‘take away’ Present indicative l[E!]v[ú] l[E!]v[å]s l[E!]v[å] l[´]v[å!]mos l[´]v[á]is l[E!]v[å)w)]

meter ‘put’

ferir

m[é]t[ú] m[E!]t[´]s m[E!]t[´] m[´]t[é]mos m[´]t[é]is m[E!]t[e)y)]

f[í]r[ú] f[E!]r[´]s f[E!]r[´] f[´]r[í]mos f[´]r[í]s f[E!]r[e)y)]

Present subjunctive l[E!]v[´] l[E!]v[´]s l[E!]v[´] l[´]v[é]mos l[´]v[é]is l[E!]v[e)y)]

m[é]t[å] m[é]t[å]s m[é]t[å] m[´]t[å!]mos m[´]t[á]is m[é]t[å)w)]

f[í]r[å] f[í]r[å]s f[í]r[å] f[i]r[å!]mos f[i]r[á]is f[í]r[å)w)]

‘wound’

The hypothesis of a [low]-metaphony caused by the theme vowel a in the 1st conjugation is, at the best, trivial, since the mid underlying vowels are necessarily low within verbal roots in the other conjugations (see Carvalho 2004); at the worst, it is simply false, as suggested by the verb chegar ‘to arrive’, which shows [e] throughout its conjugation.

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb b.

morar ‘reside’ Present indicative m[O!]r[ú] m[O!]r[å]s m[O!]r[å] m[ú]r[å!]mos m[ú]r[á]is m[O!]r[å)w)]

comer ‘eat’

tossir ‘cough’

c[ó]m[ú] c[O!]m[´]s c[O!]m[´] c[ú]m[é]mos c[ú]m[é]is c[O!]m[e)y)]

t[ú]ss[ú] t[O!]ss[´]s t[O!]ss[´] t[ú]ss[í]mos t[ú]ss[í]s t[O!]ss[e)y)]

Present subjunctive m[O!]r[´] m[O!]r[´]s m[O!]r[´] m[ú]r[é]mos m[ú]r[é]is m[O!]r[e)y)]

c[ó]m[å] c[ó]m[å]s c[ó]m[å] c[ú]m[å!]mos c[ú]m[á]is c[ó]m[å)w)]

t[ú]ss[å] t[ú]ss[å]s t[ú]ss[å] t[ú]ss[å!]mos t[ú]ss[á]is t[ú]ss[å)w)]

163

The root vowels occurring in unstressed syllables follow from the process of vowel reduction in (1), which is totally independent from metaphony.5 The latter can be described as follows: the mid-open vowel of the root is assimilated to the theme vowel, if the latter is in prevocalic position, i.e. before 1st person -o or the subjunctive -a: (8)

a.

E+e → e O+e → o

b.

E+i O+i

→ i → u

/mEte/ + o → [mét]o /kOme/ + o → [kóm]o /fEri/ + o /tOsi/ + o

→ [fír]o → [tús]o

/mEte/ + a → [mét]a /kOme/ + a → [kóm]a /fEri/ + a /tOsi/ + a

→ [fír]a → [tús]a

As seen in Carvalho (2004), explanations based on vowel truncation are unable to provide a straightforward answer to the simple following question: why does the theme vowel ‘fall’ before the 1st p. (-o) and the subjunctive (-a)? Actually, either glide formation, as in fere-o ([fE!rjú]) ‘wound it!’, or stress placement, as in feriu ([f´ri !w]) ‘he wounded’, both with theme vowel preservation, are available solutions to the putative impossibility of unstressed hiatus. Now, another type of theory allows us to give a unified explanation to the (unmarked) paroxytonic and rhizotonic6 character of the basic forms exhibiting metaphony, such as meto, meta, firo, fira, etc.. 5 6

Also note that /a/ is normally realized as [å] before nasals. I.e. stressed on the (last syllable of the) root.

164


The theme vowels, the 1st p. -o and the subjunctive vowel suffix will be seen as floating melodies. The basic idea is that floating material is associated to the skeleton whenever, and only whenever, it can. Now, since it is the presence of either of two additional morphemes (the 1st p. -o or the subjunctive suffix) that prevents the realization of the theme vowel, it will be assumed that there is only one slot available for these additional morphemes and the theme vowel, so that there is ‘not enough place’ for two vowels to be linked and thus to be phonetically realized. In this case, and only in this case, the height feature of the floating theme vowels /e/ or /i/ spreads to the root vowel, yielding the observed alternations. On the other hand, assuming that this clearly templatic constraint is dictated by the unmarked bimoraic pattern in (3a), stress is naturally expected to fall on the last vowel of the root. Thus, if the suffixes in (9) are supposed to lack any skeletal basis of their own, and if roots are lexically associated to the template in (3a), there is only one syllable left for the two vowel sets in (9), which are, thus, in complementary distribution: (9)

a.

The thematic vowels a, e, i.

b.

The 1st p. suffix o, and the subjunctive suffixes e (1st conj.), a (2nd, 3rd conj.).

Vowel alternations become entirely predictable by means of a single parameter which can be formulated as follows: (10) Linking directionality parameter: Floating melodies associate from right to left.

As illustrated in (11, 12), the theme vowel is associated to the final syllable of the verbal template if, and only if, there is no (9b)-type morpheme in the verb; otherwise, the theme vowel’s height feature spreads onto the root vowel:7

7

The CV notation of the verbal template in (11, 12) may be viewed as a shorthand for a sequence of moraic slots associated to nuclei, as in (3a). Likewise, the melodies /e/ and /i/ represent either whole segments, as in (11a,b) and (12a,b), or only vowel height features, as in (11a’,b’) and (12a’,b’), which results from the constraints on segmental structure: since there are no front rounded vowels in EP, *["kPmu] and *["tysu] are disallowed, and only the theme vowel’s height feature is compatible with both root vowels. Finally, unstressed vowel reduction, which can be captured by floating segmental components (cf. Carvalho 1994), is not represented in (11, 12).

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb (11) a.

mete: ["mEt´] m t g g C V C V g ! E e

a’. meto / meta: ["metú/å] m t g g C V C V h) G E e o/a (12) a.

fere: ["fE|´] f g C V g E

b.

a’. firo / fira: ["fi|ú/å] f r g g C V C V h) G E i o/a

come: ["kOm´] k m g g C V C V g ! O e

b’. como / coma: ["komú/å] k m g g C V C V h) G O e o/a b.

r g C V ! i

165

tosse: ["tOs´] t s g g C V C V g ! O i

b’. tusso / tussa: ["tusú/å] t s g g C V C V h) G O i o/a

3.2. As was stated above, forms such as those in (11, 12) are both paroxytonic and rhizotonic. Indeed, given the bimoraic template in (3a), whose last syllable is open and hence light, this is exactly what we expect according to EP stress placement rules (cf. § 2). The adjunction of the suffixes in (9) does not affect stress placement, and levo, leve, meto, meta, etc., with two underlying suffixes, remain paroxytonic and rhizotonic, just like leva, mete, etc., with only one suffix. Clearly, assuming that stress is CVand not melody-sensitive, the claim that the suffixes in (9) lack any skeletal basis provides the simplest way to explain such a fact. But why, then, are certain suffixes able to attract stress, giving place to arhizotonic forms? In the line of the present approach, this raises no difficulty if two classes of affixes are assumed in EP: those in (13a), which do not affect stress

166


placement in the verb, do not involve a moraic slot of their own (‘CV-less affixes’); those in (13b), which affect stress placement, will be seen as lexically associated at least to a mora (‘CV affixes’). (13) a.

b.

CV-less affixes: o ‘1st person singular’ s ‘2nd person singular’ e ‘subjunctive’ (1st conj.) a ‘subjunctive’ (2nd, 3rd conj.) a thematic vowel (1st conj.) e thematic vowel (2nd conj.) i thematic vowel (3rd conj.) CV affixes: N mos is, des i s]te(s) u ram (v)a sse ra r r n]do

(+ s, N, mos, es) (+ s, N, mos, es) (+ s, N, all CV affixes) (+ s, N, all CV affixes) (+ s, N, all CV affixes)

‘3rd person plural’ ‘1st person plural’ ‘2nd person plural’ ‘1st person singular’ + ‘perfect’ ‘2nd person singular/plural’ + ‘perfect’ ‘3rd person singular’ + ‘perfect’ ‘3rd person plural’ + ‘perfect’ ‘imperfect’ (+ s, N, mos, es) ‘imperfect subjunctive’ (+ s, N, mos, es) ‘pluperfect’ (+ s, N, mos, es) ‘infinitive’ (+ s, N, mos, es) ‘future subjunctive’ (+ s, N, mos, es) ‘gerund’

Since the affixes in (13b) have their own skeletal basis, stress falls immediately after the last syllable of the root, according to the unmarked bimoraic pattern in (3a), whenever they are added to the stem. For the same reason, this stressed syllable is left available for the theme vowel. Hence the imperfect subjunctive forms in (14, 15) (where the underlined CV stands for the stressed syllable), but also the imperfect indicative (-va for the 1st conj., -a elsewhere), the pluperfect indicative (-ra), the gerund (-ndo), the future subjunctive and the infinitive (both with an -r followed by a final empty nucleus):

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb (14) a.

b.

(15) a.

b.

metesse: [m´"tes´] m t g g C V C V g G E e comesse: [kú"mes´] k m g g C V C V g G O e ferisse: f g C V g E

[f´"|is´] r g C V G i

tossisse: [tú"sis´] t s g g C V C V g G O i

+

s g C

V

+

s g C

V

+

s g C

V

+

s g C

V

167

4. A M-constraints: stress the root/stem A more detailed phonological argumentation for the templatic basis of EP verbal metaphony (and possibly of any lexical metaphony) is provided by Carvalho (2004). I shall now be concerned with the morphological aspect of the theory developed so far. It follows from the adjunction of a CV affix in (14, 15) that the verbal form is no longer rhizotonic while still being paroxytonic, i.e. preserving an unmarked bimoraic stress pattern. Conversely, forms such as levam, metem, ferem, etc., with a CV suffix (3rd p. plural present), remain rhizotonic while becoming marked trimoraic paroxytones. Finally, forms like levássemos, metêssemos, feríssemos, levaram, meteram, feriram, etc., with two CV-associated morphemes, are both arhizotonic and accentually marked. This amounts to saying that the templatic morphology exhibited by the EP

168


verb, and exposed in § 3, results from the conjunction of two independently motivated constraints: (16) a. b.

BIMOR:

Inflected forms obey a bimoraic pattern.

STRESS(S): Inflected forms are stressed on the root (strong version); STRESS(W): Inflected forms are stressed on the stem (weak version).

Both constraints in (16) are satisfied, by the recourse to CV-less affixes, whenever the verb is associated to the morphological content in (17). (Unless otherwise indicated, STRESS(S) is the violated constraint; ‘X!’ means ‘X violation’.) (17) a.

b.

Singular:

levo, levas, leva vs. levamos, levais, levam (BIMOR!) leve, leves, leve vs. levemos, leveis, levem (BIMOR!)

Present:

levo, levas, leva vs. levei, levaste, levou, levava, etc. leve, leves, leve vs. levasse, levasses, etc.

A further degree in markedness is reached by adding the 3rd person plural suffix /N/ to the unmarked paroxytonic pattern, whence levam, metem, ferem, etc.. Associated to a mora, but lacking any syllabic basis of its own, this suffix causes BIMOR violation, but still satisfies STRESS(S) and, trivially, STRESS(W): (18) µ g …σ

N ⏐ µ + µ g! σ

Conversely, such forms as levei, meti, feri, levou, meteu, feriu, levamos, metemos, ferimos, levava, metia, levasse, metesse, levar, meter, etc., violate STRESS(S), but satisfy both BIMOR and STRESS(W): cf. (14, 15).8 Going on along the markedness scale, in forms like levávamos, metíamos, feríamos, levássemos, metêssemos, feríssemos, levavam, metiam, feriam, levassem, metessem, ferissem, levaram, meteram, feriram, etc., both BIMOR and STRESS(S) are violated; only STRESS(W) is satisfied. Likewise, 8

Though the perfect suffixes -i and -u have an underlying syllabic basis (stress falling after the root vowel), their adjunction leads to vowel contraction.


169

the future and conditional forms levarei, levará, levaremos, levarão, levaria, meterei, meterá, meteremos, meterão, meteria, etc. violate STRESS(W) and, trivially, STRESS(S); only BIMOR is satisfied. Finally, conditional plurals such as levaríamos, meteríamos, etc. involve violation of all constraints. Interestingly, future and conditional forms are perhaps the least frequent in terms of usage, and those that show the greatest propensity to suppletion (by present and imperfect forms respectively). Six classes of verbal forms can, thus, be defined thanks to the constraints in (16). Assuming for the sake of simplicity that each version of STRESS has the same weight as BIMOR, only four markedness degrees are sufficient to characterize all verbal inflections of EP, according to the ratio of violated / satisfied constraints. This is summarized in Figure 1 (where brackets stand for trivial violation or satisfaction): A BIMOR STRESS(S) STRESS(W)

0 1

1 B’ BIMOR STRESS(S)! STRESS(W) h C’ BIMOR [STRESS(S)!] STRESS(W)! 1

B 1

2

3

Figure 1. Class A: Class B: Class B’:

BIMOR! STRESS(S) [STRESS(W)] h C BIMOR! STRESS(S)! STRESS(W) 1 D BIMOR! [STRESS(S)!] STRESS(W)!

Markedness hierarchy of EP verbal forms (version 1). levo, levas, leva, leve, meto, metes, mete, meta, firo, feres, fere, fira… levam, levem, metem, metam, ferem, firam… levei, meti, feri, levou, meteu, feriu, levamos, metemos, ferimos, levava, metia, feria, levasse, metesse, ferisse, levar, meter, ferir… Class C: levávamos, metíamos, feríamos, levássemos, metêssemos, feríssemos, levavam, metiam, feriam, levassem, metessem, ferissem, levaram, meteram, feriram... Class C’: levarei, levará, levaremos, levarão, levaria, meterei, meterá, meteremos, meterão, meteria... Class D: levaríamos, meteríamos…

170


Let us explore for a moment the question of whether there is a hierarchy between these constraints. Two facts seem to suggest a complex interaction between both types of constraints. On the one hand, in dialectal and popular styles, (6b)-type phenomena lead to denasalization of the 3rd p. plural suffixes -am and -em, whence such forms as levaram, meteram, etc. pass from class C to the less marked class B’. Now, the preference for BIMOR instead of STRESS(S) satisfaction follows from phonology: the ill-formed *lévaram would be an impossible member of class B, since stress cannot go beyond the antepenultimate mora in EP. Thus, it should not be inferred from such changes that BIMOR dominates STRESS(S). Only cases of forms passing from class B to B’, or from B’ to B, would prove that these constraints are ranked. Now, interestingly, I am not aware of any example of such cases. If denasalization affects perfect forms like levaram (and perhaps even like levassem, though this leads to homophony with the singular levasse), it does never occur in rhizotonic forms such as levam, etc.. Likewise, stress shifts that would change levei, levamos (class B’) into *lévei, *lévamos (B), which, contrary to *lévaram above, would be phonologically well-formed, are not attested. A BIMOR STRESS(S) STRESS(W)

0 1

1

B 1

2

3

4

Figure 2.

B’ BIMOR STRESS(S)! STRESS(W) 1

BIMOR! STRESS(S) [STRESS(W)] 1 C BIMOR! STRESS(S)! STRESS(W) h C’ BIMOR [STRESS(S)!] STRESS(W)! h D BIMOR! [STRESS(S)!] STRESS(W)!

Markedness hierarchy of EP verbal forms (version 2).


171

On the other hand, however, at a higher markedness level, there is a change that moved stress place in imperfect forms such as Old Port. (and Galician) levavamos (C’), and gave modern EP levávamos (C). Of course, this change is due to analogical pressure (levava); nevertheless, the fact that the product of leveling, unlike the original form, is accentually marked needs further explanation. Now, this seems to prove that constraints do not have equal weight, and that satisfaction of STRESS(W) is, ceteris paribus, more important than that of BIMOR, class C being less marked than C’, whence the hierarchy of verbal forms must be revised (see Figure 2 above). 5. Conclusion: the Ph/M-asymmetry BIMOR and STRESS seem to be rather different constraints: the former is based on phonological stress rules which apply to all EP words; the other is a purely morphological constraint, which requires grammatical information such as ‘root’ and ‘stem’. In both cases, however, phonology does not act as it is supposed to do according to the derivational views of classical generative theory, but also to most OT-based accounts. It does not work as a mere interpretative component of grammar, ‘translating’ morphosyntactic outputs into phonetic forms, and, therefore, being strongly constrained by the structure of the former, nor does it follow from a (potentially) symmetrical interaction between Ph-constraints proper (ONSET, NO-CODA, etc.) and M-constraints (based on Input/Output correspondences: ALIGN, FAITHFULNESS or MAX, DEP). Indeed, phonology and morphology seem to maintain an asymmetrical relationship, where the former behaves as a ‘provider’, and the latter much as a ‘client’. As was seen in § 2, stress and stress patterns are ‘products’ supplied by phonology. They are made, in EP, independently of any morphological influence, as is shown by BIMOR and/or STRESS violation in most verbal classes. Morphology plays here an opportunist part. It must choose phonological ‘clothes’ for its own patterns. EP verbs, for example, show the four following linearly-ordered morphological sites in (19), which constitute the signifié pattern: (19)

Stem[Root

1

+ Theme] 2

+

Tense/Aspect/Mood 3

+ Number/Person 4

For ‘dressing’ the sequences in (19), morphology just exploits phonology. In particular, it is not allowed to cause any true violation of phonological constraints, as would be the case, for example, if such forms as the above mentioned *lévaram were attested among verbs, but not elsewhere. Actually, STRESS uses prosodic prominence for enhancing the prosodic weight of the

172


lexical stem; in conjunction with STRESS, BIMOR uses the bimoraic unmarked pattern of EP as a verbal template serving for the signifiant of the underspecified forms of the verb, in which ‘present’ and ‘singular’ are but the unmarked states of sites 3 and 4 in (19). Hence the main feature of this asymmetrical relationship between phonology and morphology, which distinguishes the present thesis not only from classical generative views, but also from the mainstream of contemporary research in phonological theory: while, in the line of the neogrammarian conception of phonetic changes, phonology can be said to be generally ‘blind’ vis-à-vis morphology, morphology ‘sees’ phonological objects, structures and markedness, and this is the reason why it can exploit them. Though based on constraint interaction, OT remains under the influence of its generative ancestor in that it still operates with the same type of input, that is with underlying representations deduced from the comparison of allomorphs. Thus, [fíru] will be said to derive from /fE!r+i+o/, as is the case in a SPE-based approach. It will be added that the candidate [fíru] is preferred to, say, *[fE!ru] because the thematic vowel is (minimally) conserved in the former, but not in the latter. Furthermore, an additional constraint will be necessary for ruling out an output such as *[fE!rju], which is phonologically well-formed in EP. Now, the relationship suggested in this article is not between /fE!r+i+o/ and the set of surface candidates ; it is between the signifié pattern in (19), and the signifiant patterns provided by EP phonology in (20): (20) a. Stress unmarked patterns: /µ2 µ1/ µ2 µ1 g g …σ σ b. Stress marked patterns: /µ3 µ2 µ1/ µ3 µ2 µ1 g g g …σ σ σ

µ2 µ1 g1 …σ

µ3 g …σ

µ2 µ1 g1 σ

The ‘optimal’ solutions chosen by verbal morphology for its unmarked forms are of the (21)-type: multilinear representations which capture both the three specified morphemes of the word (cf. /fE!r+i+o/), and its dissyllabic shape ([fíru]), and thus conciliate the former with the latter through metaphony:9 9

Note that this divergence is not a matter of formalism: most OT-based research is actually agnostic with respect to representations, and the linear form /fE!r+i+o/ might as well be replaced with the multi-tiered structure in (21); my point is that, far from being a possible input, (21) is the winning candidate.

Markedness Gradient in the Portuguese Verb (21)

firo ["fi|ú]

f g C

r g V C h) E i

173

V G o

In sum, the present proposal diverges from OT in at least two ways: (a) there are no Input/Output correspondences, but only relationships between inputs,10 since lexical entries are necessarily twofold, and comprise both types of patterns in (19) and (20); (b) the set of candidates might not be infinite; ill-formed structures, i.e. those that do not obey the morphological and/or the phonological patterns in (19, 20), are irrelevant to linguistic analysis. References Carvalho, J.B. de. 1989. “Phonological conditions on Portuguese clitic placement: on syntactic evidence for stress and rhythmical patterns”. Linguistics 27.405-436. . 1994. “What are vowels made of? The ‘no-rule’ approach and particle phonology”. Studia linguistica 48.1-27. . 2004. “Templatic morphology in the Portuguese verb.” Nouveaux départs en phonologie: les conceptions sub- et suprasegmentales, Meisenburg & Selig 2004. 13-32. Harris, J.W. 1974. “Evidence from Portuguese for the ‘Elsewhere condition’ in phonology”. Linguistic inquiry 5.61-80. López, B. 1979. The sound pattern of Brazilian Portuguese. Doctoral diss., University of California. Los Angeles. Lüdtke, H. 1953. “Fonemática portuguesa: II-Vocalismo”. Boletim de filologia 14.197-217. McCarthy, J.J. 1981: “A prosodic theory of nonconcatenative morphology”. Linguistic inquiry 12.373-418. McCarthy, J.J. & A. Prince. 1994. “The emergence of the unmarked: Optimality in prosodic morphology”. Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 24. Amherst, MA: GLSA. Meisenburg, T. & M. Selig (eds.). 2004. Nouveaux départs en phonologie: les conceptions sub- et suprasegmentales. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Quicoli, C. 1990. “Harmony, lowering and nasalization in Brazilian 10

As well as relationships between outputs, giving place to analogical phenomena that have long been neglected within the generative tradition.

174


Portuguese”. Lingua 80.295-331. Redenbarger, W. 1981. Articulator features and Portuguese vowel height. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University. Wetzels, L. 1995. “Mid-vowel alternations in the Brazilian Portuguese verb”. Phonology 12.281-304.

Intonational Patterns in Russian Interrogatives — Phonetic Analyses and Phonological Interpretations — Yosuke IGARASHI 1. Introduction This article is devoted to empirical and theoretical examinations of intonational patterns which appear in two types of Russian interrogative sentences, wh questions (WHQ) and yes-no questions (YNQ) 1 . In the previous studies, there has been fairly general agreement that the pattern in WHQ and the pattern in YNQ are two categorically different intonational patterns (Bryzgunova 1980; Kodzasov 1996; Svetozarova 1998). It seems, therefore, reasonable to expect that two intonational patterns are phonetically realized as clearly different fundamental frequency (F0) contours. However, visual inspection of the F0 contours, corresponding to the two patterns, reveals that their phonetic differences are by no means obvious. We can

WHQ

Kogó nanjalá Lamánova? ‘Who did Lamanova hire?’

Figure 1.

1

YNQ Egó nanjalá Lamánova? ‘Is it him that Lamanova hired?’

Waveform and F0 contour for WHQ (left) and YNQ (right), from test sentences of Dataset B in Experiment II, showing the segmental and F0 points measured (see Section 4).

Preliminary discussion on the subject of the present article is presented in Igarashi (2004a; 2004b)

176

Yosuke IGARASHI

notice from Figure 1 that both patterns are realized as strikingly similar contours: they both have a rise-fall configuration in which the rise takes place near the stressed syllable -gó in kogó ‘whom” and egó ‘him’, respectively, and the fall immediately follows the rise. Curiously enough, there is no reference in literature on the absence of obvious phonetic differences between these two patterns and correspondingly there has been little attempt to examine how they phonetically differ from each other. This leads us to conduct more detailed experimental investigations in order to explore the phonetic differences. This is the first goal of this article. In fact, most of the previous descriptions about the patterns in WHQ and YNQ are quite simple: the patterns have been described, for example, as ‘Fall’ for WHQ and ‘Rise’ for YNQ (Bryzgunova 1980; Kodzasov 1999). Obviously, descriptions of this sort do not reflect phonetic properties of the patterns. It would thus be natural to consider them as ‘phonological’ descriptions of the patterns in which redundant phonetic features are factored out and solely linguistically relevant features are reflected. However, in these studies division of labor between the phonetics and the phonology of intonation is quite confused. In this article, we will propose a new phonological interpretation of the intonational patterns in WHQ and YNQ, based on the results of the experiments. This is the second goal of the present article. The present article is divided into six sections. Chapter 2 will outline the past descriptions on intonational patterns in WHQ and YNQ. In Section 3 and Section 4 two experiments will be performed for the first goal of this article. Section 5 will be for the second goal of the present article: here we will propose a new phonological interpretation of the two patterns on the basis of the experimental results. In Section 6, we will summarize the discussion and raise issues for further research. 2. Description of the pattern in WHQ and YNQ in the previous studies In this section, we will review how these patterns have been described in the past studies. Before that, a few remarks should be made concerning the fact that some of the previous researchers identified two different patterns for WHQ. We will first discuss the patterns for WHQ and define one of them as the subject of the investigation. After that, we will outline the previous description of the patterns for YNQ and WHQ. 2.1. ‘Hat pattern’ and ‘peak pattern’ in WHQ In some of the past works, at least two intonational patterns are reported to appear in WHQ. In what follows, we will refer to them as a ‘hat pattern’

Intonational Patterns in Russian Interrogatives

177

and a ‘peak pattern’. The description of a hat pattern can be found in the works by e.g. Sevetozarova (1998), Nikolaeva (1977) and Kodzasov (1999). This pattern is characterized by the F0 rise in a question word, the F0 fall in the phrase-final word and the high F0 level between the rise and the fall. A peak pattern is described in the studies by e.g. Sevetozarova (1998), Kodzasov (1999) and Bryzgunova (1980). This pattern was illustrated in Figure 1 (left): F0 goes up in a question word and then immediately falls down. The existence of two types of pattern for WHQ brings us to wonder which of them is more typical, or less marked. In fact, opinions are divided among researchers on this issue. Svetozarova regards the peak pattern as a more marked pattern for WHQ, saying that a peak pattern is a ‘rarer’ one for WHQ (Svetozarova 1998: 269). Kodzasov agrees with markedness of a peak pattern, arguing that ‘a pitch fall on the question word usually occurs only in the case when the following part of the content has already been actualized’ (Kodzasov 1996: 96). That is, he claims not only that a peak pattern is marked for WHQ, but also that the choice of each of the two patterns is dependent on the informational structure of WHQ. Bryzgunova (1980), by contrast, appears to regard a peak pattern as almost the only pattern which can be used in WHQ. In Bryzgunova’s framework, what we refer to as a hat pattern, accompanied by specific characteristics in duration and pitch range, is classified into the pattern for an exclamation sentence. While question as to which of the patterns is marked for WHQ and what semantic/ pragmatic differences are distinguished by the two patterns is of theoretical interest, it goes far beyond the scope of the present study. Leaving this question aside, we define a peak pattern as the subject of the investigation. We have theoretical and practical reasons for it. First, because our subjects had produced only peak patterns in the experiments, it was impossible for us to examine a hat pattern. Second, since a hat pattern is realized as an obviously distinct F0 contour, it is no use to compare it with the pattern in YNQ. 2.2. Phonetic differences between the patterns in WHQ and in YNQ The important point in the past descriptions for our discussion is that there has been no mention of the striking similarity in F0 contours between the pattern in WHQ and the pattern in YNQ, and thus little experimental investigation has been made on the phonetic differences between the two patterns. In addition, detailed descriptions of a peak pattern are not presented in most of the past studies. In this respect the Bryzgunova’s study, where the peak pattern in WHQ is extensively described, can be seen as an exception. It would therefore be worth while reviewing Bryzgunova’s description first.

178

Yosuke IGARASHI

In Bryzgunova’s framework the patterns for WHQ and YNQ are called ‘IK-2’ and ‘IK-3’, respectively.2 As a first approximation, Bryzgunova’s characterization of IK-2 and IK-3 can be summarized as following. IK-2 has an F0 fall in the accented syllable, while IK-3 has an F0 rise in the syllable3. For the F0 movement before and after the accented syllable, in her description, there are no significant differences: the F0 is mid-level before the stressed syllable and low-level after it (see Figure 2). According to Bryzgunova, the phonetic difference between the two patterns thus lies in the F0 shape in the stressed syllable: ‘Fall’ for WHQ and ‘Rise’ for YNQ. Obviously, the phonetic differences between the two patterns are not as simple as in Bryzgunova’s description. This makes it clear that Bryzgunova’s description is inadequate as a phonetic description of the two intonational patterns.

IK-2 Vy na kakóm fakul’téte účites’? ‘What faculty are you studying at?’ Figure 2.

K-3 Vy býli v kinó? ‘Were you in a theater?

F0 contours for two types of intonational pattern, IK-2 (the pattern for WHQ) and IK-3 (the pattern for YNQ), schematically represented by Bryzgunova (1980: 190, 111).

It might appear that Bryzgunova’s description is not phonetic but phonological: a description of the two patterns as a ‘Fall’ and ‘Rise’ might have resulted from removing all the redundant features from the description. It seems, however, not to be the case. We should not overlook the fact that we can find descriptions in Bryzgunova’s work (Bryzgunova 1980: 98, 111), in which the F0 configuration in the stressed syllable of IK-2 is defined not only as ‘Fall’ but also as ‘Flat’ (rovnoe dviženie). This means that Bryzgunova offers two different phonological representations to a single intonational pattern. It is obviously a theoretical drawback providing that her description is phonological. Of course, it is not a problem if we see the ‘Fall’ and the ‘Flat’ as phonetic variations of a single phonological category. But again, it seems not to be the case. 2 3

She identified seven types of IK in Russian. ‘IK’ is the abbreviation of intonacionnye konstrukcii. IK-2 is accompanied by an additional feature ‘usilenie slovesnogo udarenija’, which serves as a distinction from IK-1, another falling pattern. This feature will not be discussed in this article.


179

We can not find a clear division in Bryzgunova’s work between the level of description where phonological categories are defined and the level where phonetic variations of these categories are defined. In fact both IK-2 and IK-3 contain a variation that has a fall-rise-fall contour and in this case, steepness of the rise is claimed to serve as a distinction between the two patterns: when the rise of the fall-rise-fall contour is steep, then it is classified as IK-3. Here, a ‘Fall’ vs. ‘Rise’ contrast shown in Figure 2 plays no role at all. After all, it is not clear what ‘distinctive feature’ differentiates IK-2 from IK-3, and how a set of phonetic realizations is derived from a single phonological category. It seems that, using an analogy of segmental phonology, Bryzgunova offers solely a list of ‘allophones’ but provides no description about ‘phonemes’. In effect, there are considerable discrepancies between the identified patterns and the F0 contours in her description, as have been criticized by a number of researchers (e.g. Keijsper 1992; Odé 1992; Yokoyama 2003). It can be concluded, from what is said above, that a description of the patterns for WHQ and YNQ as ‘Fall’ vs. ‘Rise’ is not adequate either as a phonetic or as a phonological one. We need to make more detailed examinations into the difference. As noted above, there is little investigation of the phonetic differences between the patterns for WHQ and YNQ. However, there is a good deal of discussion in the previous works on the comparison of the pattern for YNQ with the pattern for declarative sentences. It is useful to review these works for understanding of the pattern for YNQ. Makarova (2002) constructed a set of speech stimuli with a rise-fall F0 contour, which varied in alignment and height of the F0 peak, and conducted a perceptual experiment to investigate how the stimuli are semantically interpreted (declaratives, interrogatives and exclamations). One of the relevant points of her findings is that the stimuli with the lower F0 peak (270 Hz) yielded less interrogative judgments than stimuli with the higher F0 peak (320 Hz). This result suggests that the pattern for YNQ is characterized by the high F0 peak. Meyer and Mleinek (forthcoming) studied interactions of intonation with focus structure and pragmatic force (declarative vs. YNQ), and found, among other things, that the F0 peak was scaled higher in YNQ than in declarative sentences irrespective of focus structure. High F0 peaks in the pattern for YNQ have apparently been reported in more traditional works in terms of a ‘steep’ rise in the accented syllable (Bryzgunova 1980; Svetozarova 1998; Fougeron 1999). In the abovementioned study of Makarova (2002), it was also found that the stimuli with the later alignment of the F0 peak were judged as interrogatives while those with the earlier alignment were judged as declaratives. The later alignment of the F0 peak in

180

Yosuke IGARASHI

YNQ than in declaratives is also reported in the study of Meyer and Mleinek (forthcoming) cited above. Although the previous descriptions just outlined were comparisons of the pattern for YNQ with the pattern for declaratives, high scaling and late alignment of the F0 peak can be regarded as ones of the characteristics of the pattern for YNQ. In fact, the F0 contours in Figure 1 suggest that the peak is aligned later and scaled higher in YNQ than WHQ. It is fairly possible that the alignment and scaling of the peak are one of the phonetic differences between the two patterns. 3. Experiment I Experiment I was aimed at a brief understanding of the phonetic differences between the WHQ pattern and the YNQ pattern. 3.1. Methods Our basic approach in this experiment was to measure the specific points of the F0 contour in prepared short sentences (WHQ and YNQ), read aloud by native speakers of Russian. The points measured were 1) the F0 value of the beginning of the utterance, 2) the F0 value of the end of the utterance, 3) the F0 value of the peak at the end of the F0 rise and 4) the alignment of the peak at the end of the F0 rise. We expected that there should be a significant difference between WHQ and YNQ in some of these points. 3.1.1. Speech materials Six sentences were designed, three for WHQ and three for YNQ4. They are presented and underlined in Table 1. The test sentences had identical texts except that the WHQ were given a question word kakój ‘what (kind of)’ and the YNQ were given a pronoun takój ‘this (kind of)’. All the test sentences were provided with corresponding answers. The answer sentences for YNQ were given, so that the focus should be put on the pronoun. We expected that contexts like these would make speakers put a pitch accent on the stressed syllable of kakój for WHQ and of takój for YNQ. While the question and answer sentences were both recorded, only the question sentences were measured and analyzed. In order to avoid microprosodic effects on the F0 around the accented syllable and the end of the utterance, we used as many sonorants as possible for consonants after the stressed syllable of the question word or the pronoun.

4

Though they can not be considered as ‘sentences’ in a strict syntactic sense, we may be safe in assuming that it will cause no problems for the purpose of the present study.


181

Table 1. Test sentences for Experiment I. The sentences that were measured and analyzed are the underlined question sentences. WHQ – Kakój nómer? ‘What number?’ – Dvenádcatyj. ‘Twelveth.’ – Kakój limón? ‘What lemon?’ – Vot ėto, pažalyjsta. ‘This one, please.’ – Kakój limonád? ‘What lemonade?’ – Sládkij. ‘Sweet one.’

YNQ – Takój nómer? – Da, takój. – Takój limón? – Da, takój. – Takój limonád? – Da, takój.

‘This number?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘This lemonade?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘This lemonade?’ ‘Yes, it is.’

3.1.2. Speakers The materials were read by four female native speakers of Russian. In what follows, the speakers are identified as A, M, T and Z. M and Z were nineteen years old, and A and M were in their early twenties. They all had been studying at an institute or university in Tokyo at the time of recording. The speakers had no known speech or hearing problems and were naïve as to the purpose of the experiment. 3.1.3. Recording and analysis procedures The recordings were made on Digital Audio Tape (DAT) in a quiet room at the speakers’ home. Speakers read the sentences ten times from a set of cards, each of which had a question sentence (=test sentence) and an answer sentence typed on it. The order of the sentences was random. Speakers were asked to read sentences as naturally as possible. The recorded materials were digitized at a sampling rate of 16 kHz and were analyzed using ESPS Waves+ software. All measurements were performed manually in a simultaneous display of the waveform, wide-band spectrogram, and F0 track. The utterance beginning and end were measured at corresponding points in the F0 contour and were marked as ‘L1’ and ‘L2’, respectively. The peak at the end of the F0 rise was measured at the highest F0 point around the offset of the accented syllable, and was marked as ‘H’. The four segmental points measured were the onset of the accented syllable, the onset of the accented vowel, the offset of the accented vowel, and the onset of the following unstressed vowel. These points were marked as ‘C0’, ‘V0’, ‘C1’ and ‘V1’ respectively (see Figure 3).

182

Yosuke IGARASHI

WHQ

Kakój limonád? ‘What lemonade?’ YNQ

Figure 3.

Takój limonád?

‘This lemonade?’

Waveform and F0 contour for WHQ (left) and YNQ (right), from test sentences of Experiment I, showing the segmental and F0 points measured.

3.2. Results and discussion All the data were analyzed on the basis of t-tests for each speaker separately, with sentence type (WHQ vs. YNQ) as the independent variable. The dependent variables for each t-test were the alignment of the peak (H), the F0 value of the peak (H), the F0 value of the beginning of the utterance (L1) and the end of the utterance (L2). The alignment of the peak was measured by calculating the temporal distance between the onset of the stressed syllable (C0) and the peak (H), divided by the syllable duration (the duration between C0 and C1). Tables 2-5 demonstrate means, standard deviations (SD), t-ratios and p-values for each point that we measured. Below we will discuss the results in detail. Table 2. Alignment of H. Means (SD) and individual analyses. df=58. Values lower than 1 indicate H is aligned inside the accented syllable. WHQ

YNQ

t

p

Table 3. F0 value of H (in Hz). Means (SD) and individual analyses. df=58.

WHQ

YNQ

t

p

A

0.19 (0.3)

1.40 (0.2)

-16.70

Prosody And Syntax: Cross-linguistic Perspectives (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory

Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory

Linguistic Informatics- State Of The Art And The Future: The First International Conference On Linguistic Informatics (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Corpus-Based Perspectives in Linguistics (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Logical Syntax and Semantics, Their Linguistic Relevance

Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives

Provocative Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Spoken Language Corpus and Linguistic Informatics

Provocative Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Linguistic Reconstruction and Indo-European Syntax

Prosody, Focus, and Word Order (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

The Antisymmetry of Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

The Syntax of Words (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education

Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education

Language universals and linguistic typology: syntax and morphology

Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology

Syntax of Scope (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, 21)

New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics - Volume I: Syntax and Morphology (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)

The Prosody of Terence

Prosody and idioms in English

The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Sentence Processing: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Prosody, focus, and word order

International Perspectives in Health Informatics - Volume 164 Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Progression and Regression in Language: Sociocultural, Neuropsychological and Linguistic Perspectives

Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives

Prosody in Indonesian Languages

Topic and Focus: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation

Prosody And Syntax: Cross-linguistic Perspectives (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory

Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory

Linguistic Informatics- State Of The Art And The Future: The First International Conference On Linguistic Informatics (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Corpus-Based Perspectives in Linguistics (Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics)

Logical Syntax and Semantics, Their Linguistic Relevance

Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives

Provocative Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Spoken Language Corpus and Linguistic Informatics

Provocative Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Linguistic Reconstruction and Indo-European Syntax

Prosody, Focus, and Word Order (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

The Antisymmetry of Syntax (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

The Syntax of Words (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education

Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education

Language universals and linguistic typology: syntax and morphology

Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology

Syntax of Scope (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, 21)

New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics - Volume I: Syntax and Morphology (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)

The Prosody of Terence

Prosody and idioms in English

The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Sentence Processing: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Prosody, focus, and word order

International Perspectives in Health Informatics - Volume 164 Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Progression and Regression in Language: Sociocultural, Neuropsychological and Linguistic Perspectives

Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives

Prosody in Indonesian Languages

Topic and Focus: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation

Recommend Documents