Towards a Model for German Prosody

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt is made to outline a model for Geiman prosody, The model aims at generating the rhythm and melody of German utterances. i.e. their temporal and tonal structures, by starting from linguistic Information in the input and then applying phonological and phonetic mies. The model consists of three main components: the basic temporal and tonal components where the basic temporal and tonal structures of utterances are generated separately from each other and the modification component where the basic structures are mpdified in different ways according to various demands. Starting out from an inherent duration of the Segments spectrally defined in the input, their basic durations are oalculated äs a consequence of various contextual faetors. Operating on the tonal prosodic features of the input, pitch rewriting rules transpose the linguistic features into a notation of tonal points or levels HIGH or LOW which are related to spectral events and of the tonal ränge WIDE bound to the HIGHs and LOWs. These tonal specifications are transferred in a series of steps by the Intonation algorithm into phonetic values. Drawing on acoustic data and on manipulations of the pitch of utterances by means of speech synthesis, some concepts of an Intonation theory concerning German are discussed.