The tune drives the text

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the vital role of intonation in speech communication. While contemporary models represent intonation—the tune—and the text that bears it on separate autonomous tiers, this paper distils previously unconnected findings across diverse languages that point to important interactions between these two tiers. These interactions often involve vowels, which, given their rich harmonic structure, lend themselves particularly well to the transmission of pitch. Existing vowels can be lengthened, new vowels can be inserted and loss of their voicing can be blocked. The negotiation between tune and text ensures that pragmatic information is accurately transmitted and possibly plays a role in the typology of phonological systems.

Vocative Intonation in Language Contact: The Case of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish

“…6 This blocking of vowel reduction (or even deletion) in vocatives has also been reported for European Portuguese, which shows reduction patterns that are similar to those of the languages under consideration here (Frota and de Moraes 2016;Frota 2014). In one case, the final vowel was even clearly split up into two syllables, which is a strategy reported for the tonic syllable in some languages when there is no post-tonic material for the realization of boundary tones (Andreeva and Dimitrova, forthcoming b for Bulgarian; Frota and de Moraes 2016 for Portuguese; see also Roettger and Grice 2019). In general, this type of enhancement of the final syllable is well established in vocatives.…”

“…Along the lines of Sóskuthy and Roettger (2020), it can thus be suggested that the tone-carrying properties of this syllable are optimized for both the production and the perceptual retrieval of pitch (for the trade-off between a bias toward optimizing message-transmission accuracy and a bias to reduce resource cost see also Hall et al 2018). Furthermore, Roettger and Grice (2019) observed that such tune-driven adjustments of the text typically occur with tonal configurations involving a high pitch component. Fittingly, in our data, final syllables are most often enhanced with contours of the '!H' and 'HL' types but usually not with 'L'.…”

Prosody leaks into the memories of words

“…Prosodic structure has a substantial influence on the phonetic form of words, including their duration (e.g., Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2000). There is emerging evidence that the phonological properties of words are molded in part by the broader pragmatic goals of speech embodied in prosody (Roettger & Grice, 2019). Words produced at prosodic boundaries, under prosodic focus, or sentential stress are systematically enhanced, often produced with greater duration, intensity and pitch excursions than words in less prominent positions.…”