The Importance of a Distributional Approach to Categoriality in Autosegmental-Metrical Accounts of Intonation

Abstract

When annotating a speech signal using an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation, transcribers associate portions of the F 0 contour with labels from a finite inventory of tonal categories. In the models we are concerned with here, these categories have the status of phonological units (phonological form), bridging the intrinsic variability of the speech signal (substance) with the intrinsic fuzziness of post-lexical function (meaning). This, together with the relatively small size of the label inventory, precludes a one-to-one relationship between form and substance, and/or between form and function. A Neapolitan Italian corpus of read speech is used to investigate the distributional properties of two pitch accents that have been studied extensively with respect to substance (the alignment of F 0 peaks) and meaning (sentence modality). Although there is a general consensus that peaks in this variety are aligned earlier in declaratives than in interrogatives, evidence is provided of contexts in which the converse is true, i.e., in which interrogative peaks are even earlier than their declarative counterparts. In this respect, interrogatives have a richer internal structure than declaratives. We argue that differences in how variably a prosodic category is encoded can be dealt with in an intonation transcription system, as long as this system relates phonological form (the choice of pitch accent in this case) both to phonetic substance and to meaning in a transparent way. 1 This is true of any intonation transcription system, although priorities vary. For instance, within the British school, Crystal prioritizes substance and sees intonation as "the product of the interaction of features from different prosodic systems-tone, pitch-range, loudness, rhythmicality and tempo in particular" (Crystal, 1975, p. 283), whereas Halliday (1967) emphasizes meaning, in accordance with his understanding of intonation as a system within the grammar of English. For recent views on the importance of meaning in intonation transcription, see also Arvaniti (2016) and Cole and Shattuck-Hufnagel (2016).

Word final schwa is driven by intonation—The case of Bari Italian

“…The presence vs. absence of an extra final rise is dependent on dialect and speaking style (Savino 2012). Cangemi and Grice (2016) looked at the alignment of the high target of the pitch accent across instances with and without an utterance-final rise. They found strong evidence for the high target shifting to the left when a phrase-final rise is present, even to the point of being earlier than the statement target.…”

Surface and Structure: Transcribing Intonation within and across Languages

“…By contrast, the peak shows later alignment into the nuclear syllable if the narrow focused word initiates the IP (as in Figure 1, left panel). All these peak alignment differences are clearly context-dependent and predictable given the distribution of the nuclear falls as initial or final nuclei: late initial peak placement is triggered by a preceding prosodic edge, and early final peak placement is triggered by a following prosodic edge (see Cangemi & Grice, 2016, for discussion of a similar type of contextually determined variation and a similar understanding of how it may be dealt with in intonation transcription).…”

Probabilistic relation between co-speech gestures, pitch accents and information status

“…In Table 1, accent types and information status, aligned with the Prominence hierarchy and the Information status hierarchy, respectively, are mapped to each other: unaccented words or L* with given information, !H* with bridging information, H* with unused information, and L+H* with new information. More recent empirical studies, however, suggest that pitch accents probabilistically encode information status (Baumann & Riester 2013, Cangemi & Grice 2016, Im et al 2018.…”