Developments in the Study of Intonational Typology

Abstract

The paper describes recent developments in the study of intonation as they contribute to the goal of an intonational typology. Although intonation research is a long‐established research field, investigations of cross‐linguistic variation in intonation are more recent. The availability of technological support has advanced the field tremendously, both methodologically and intellectually, facilitating cross‐linguistic comparisons. The practical demand for speech technology applications has further advanced research in the field. Cross‐dialectal variation in intonation promises to continue being a thriving research field in the coming years. The paper discusses why no typology of intonation exists as yet and shows that typologically relevant parameters are being filtered out and delineated by work currently being carried out.

One Way or Another: Evidence for Perceptual Asymmetry in Pre-attentive Learning of Non-native Contrasts

“…Specifically, Dev-Falling (i.e., a level tone as the standard and a falling tone as the deviant) may be perceptually less salient than Dev-Level (i.e., a falling tone as the standard and a level tone as the deviant) as the former may resemble a more natural sounding decline in speech also known as downdrift, or the tendency for pitch to decline gradually near the end of a narrative phrase ( Lindau, 1986 ; Myers, 1999 ). Speakers often signal the topic closure by a pitch fall, and introduce a new topic by resetting the onset height to a high pitch ( Wichmann, 2000 ), which is a phenomenon that has been categorized as a global or semi-global intonation feature ( Cruttenden, 1997 ; Hirst and Di Cristo, 1998 ; Zerbian, 2010 ). This indicates that downdrift may be a general perceptual bias in natural speech perception and production and that it may be more difficult for listeners to detect a pitch contrast with a falling tendency than with a rising one.…”

L’intonation dans les langues tonales : des réflexions générales et deux études de cas

“…Clairement, la réponse est non : les langues tonales possèdent, outre les tons, un système intonatif propre, de sorte qu'il n'est pas adéquat d'opposer langues « à tons » et langues « à intonation ». Cette nécessaire mise au point a été réitérée à de multiples reprises au fil de l'histoire des théories linguistiques (voir en particulier Hockett 1963;Zerbian 2010). En revanche, une idée reçue plus tenace consiste à dire que l'intonation joue un rôle moindre dans les langues tonales.…”

An Overview of Lithuanian Intonation: A Linguistic and Modelling Perspective

“…Mandarin, Thai or Vietnamese), variations of pitch indicate changes in the lexical meaning of a word. At the sentence level, intonation is understood as the use of tone for non-lexical purposes, such as syntactic demarcation, differentiation of sentence types, and signalling of information structure (Zerbian, 2010). As on the physical level, word-intonation and sentence-intonation, as well as other prosodic phenomena, share many characteristics, they can hardly be described in isolation, and their interaction is of typological interest (Hirst and Di Cristo, 1998;Ladd, 2001).…”

“…Although most classical prosodic typologies are solely based on word-level features, such as the famous three-way distinction between "stress, tone and pitch-accent" languages, growing cross-linguistic evidence points to the fact that sentence-level intonational features are not entirely predictable from word-prosodic systems (Jun, 2005;Hamlaoui et al, 2019). For this reason, there is an ongoing discussion on the necessity to integrate more aspects of sentence-level intonation (Zerbian, 2010) or on the creation of an intonational typology altogether (Ladd, 2001(Ladd, , 2008Arvaniti, 2016). Finally, although intonation has been studied in linguistics and psycholinguistics for decades (Bolinger, 1964;Lieberman, 1965;Selkirk, 1978;Hirst and Di Cristo, 1998;Hallé et al, 1991;Snow and Balog, 2002), this research mostly examined only a few languages (e.g.…”

“…Finally, although intonation has been studied in linguistics and psycholinguistics for decades (Bolinger, 1964;Lieberman, 1965;Selkirk, 1978;Hirst and Di Cristo, 1998;Hallé et al, 1991;Snow and Balog, 2002), this research mostly examined only a few languages (e.g. English, Swedish, Japanese or French) and rarely compared intonational systems cross-linguistically (Zerbian, 2010).…”