Greek wh-questions and the phonology of intonation

Abstract

The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. Using acoustic data, we show (i) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (ii) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment, depending on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets. Models that specify the F0 of all syllables, or models that specify F0 by superposing contour shapes for shorter and longer domains, cannot account for such fine-grained lawful variation except by using ad hoc tonal specifications, which, in turn, do not allow for phonological generalisations about contours applying to utterances of greatly different lengths. In contrast, our findings follow easily from an autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology, according to which melodies may contain long F0 stretches derived by interpolation between specified targets associated with metrically strong syllables and prosodic boundaries.

Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning

“…Many theories and computational models of F 0 patterns have been proposed over the years (Anderson et al, 1984;Bailly and Holm, 2005;Black and Hunt, 1996;Fujisaki et al, 2005;Grabe et al, 2007;Hirst, 2005Hirst, , 2011Jilka et al, 1999;Kochanski and Shih, 2003;Mixdorff et al, 2003;Pierrehumbert, 1980Pierrehumbert, , 1981Prom-on et al, 2009;Taylor, 2000;van Santen and Möbius, 2000;Xu and Wang, 2001;Xu, 2005), and a large number of empirical studies have been conducted (as reviewed by Wagner and Watson, 2010;ShattuckHufnagel and Turk, 1996;Xu, 2011). Despite the extensive effort, however, most of the critical issues still remain unresolved and some are still under heated debate (Arvaniti and Ladd, 2009;Ladd, 2008;Wagner and Watson, 2010;Wightman, 2002;Xu, 2011). This lack of consensus has been an obstacle to linking basic prosody research to applied areas, resulting in slow advances in developing applications with capabilities for processing prosody.…”

Focus in Greek wh-questions

“…In this respect Greek contrasts with English where wh-questions behave just like affirmatives, that is, the nuclear stress is usually on the last word. 6 For a more recent analysis of the prosodic structure of wh-questions see Arvaniti and Ladd (2009). There are differences in the analysis of the prosodic structure of wh-questions in that paper, which, however, do not affect our analysis here.…”

“…7 F0 may not fall immediately after the wh-phrase, but a bit later, after the stressed vowel of the word following the wh-word, see Arvaniti and Ladd (2009 Figure 1 and 2).…”

Polynomial Modeling of Child and Adult Intonation in German Spontaneous Speech

“…11 Of course, this approach presupposes that there is a phonology of intonation, a viewpoint that is still disputed by some researchers (e.g., Xu & Xu, 2005). A discussion of this debate is beyond the scope of this article, but the interested reader is referred to Ladd (2008) and Arvaniti and Ladd (2009) for an indepth treatise of the issues involved.…”