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

Abstract

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

Melodic constructions in Spanish: Metrical structure determines the association properties of intonational tones

“…If this analysis is correct, this would mean that the low-rising-falling melodic construction in Spanish not only has a variable nuclear accent depending on phrase length (the number of prosodic words) -a feature shared with the other two melodies presented in the previous subsection -but also that these same changes in phrase length can lead to its edge tone alternating between a very clear high target followed by a slight fall (HL% in AM notation), and a clear low target (L%). Thus, the phenomenon that we describe here differs from familiar cases of tonal crowding, in which f0 targets can be slightly displaced or undershot when under time pressure, for instance when the nuclear syllable is final in the phrase (Grabe et al 2000, Hanssen, Peters & Gussenhoven 2007, Rathcke 2016. The alternation described here between (3a) and (3b) involves alternations in the association properties of tones despite the fact that the nuclear syllable is non-final in the phrase, as both have a postnuclear unaccented syllable.…”

The Autosegmental-Metrical Model of Intonational Phonology

“…Typical cases of truncation attributed to phonetic implementation have such a voiceless coda (see, e.g., Grabe 1998 for German and Grabe, Post, Nolan, and Farrar 2000 for va ri e ties of En glish). However, Rathcke (2016) has shown that patterns of truncation are languagespecific, as well as dependent on the association properties of a par tic u lar tone. Furthermore, she discusses the truncation of the fall in Rus sian rise-falls as "a categorical abandonment of an under lying boundary tone" (223).…”

Music to Your Ears

“…Hence, the facilitating effect of sonority for the perception of STS could stem from aspects of sound production that also play a crucial role in pitch transmission and perception (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). However, phrases consisting exclusively of sonorants do not frequently occur in natural language (Rathcke, 2017), while in singing, sonority of underlying linguistic representations is typically enhanced by lengthening of vowels, i.e., by changing timing characteristics of speech acoustics (Eckardt, 1999). A deeper understanding of STS-foundations and mechanisms will benefit from future studies into potential interactions between timbral quality of varied sentence sonority (Clements, 1990) and the phonetics of resulting pitch patterns (cf.…”