... Beste bi hiztunen joera ez genuen izan aukerarik grabatzeko baina gure belarrietara guztiz ar... more ... Beste bi hiztunen joera ez genuen izan aukerarik grabatzeko baina gure belarrietara guztiz argi zegoen azentuaren kokagunea zein zen eta gure artean adostasun osoa geneukan ... re.kin se.mf.as e.ra.ku.tsi e.ra.ku.tzf i.tu.rrLa itxurrixe / i.txu.rrf.xe pa.lan.ka.ren pa.lan.kin e.tor.ki.zu ...
This study investigates the influence of syntactic branching and constituent length on prosodic b... more This study investigates the influence of syntactic branching and constituent length on prosodic boundary placement in three Iberian languages: Catalan, European Portuguese, and Spanish. The most common phrasing in Catalan is (S)(VO). However, in cases of long branching objects or double-branching objects with non-branching subjects, (SV)(O) phrasings are frequent, due to a tendency to balance the weight and length of the prosodic constituents. Spanish utterances are mainly grouped as (S)(VO), regardless of constituent length or syntactic complexity. In Portuguese, (SVO) is the usual phrasing. Only a long branching subject strongly favors the phrasing (S)(VO), not a short branching subject or a short or long branching object. In the three languages, length rather than syntactic complexity plays a role in boundary placement.
In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has not... more In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has not been discussed in the literature on focus in generative grammar. We refer to a type of answers to wh-questions in which the constituent that fills the variable does not do so exhaustively, that is, it does not provide an exhaustive answer because the speaker cannot commit to asserting that the other potential alternative candidates to fill the variable are cancelled. The type of narrow focus usually discussed in the literature is one in which a constituent fills the variable of the question exhaustively, with a concomitant cancellation of the rest of the focal alternatives. We call these types of narrow focus Non-Exhaustive Narrow Focus (NENF) and Exhaustive Narrow Focus (ENF), respectively. In our experiment, we measured peak scaling and alignment of accents in the subject and the verb in ENF and NENF utterances. The results show that NENF is distinguished from ENF in having a pitch ac...
In Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB), Intermediate Phrases (ips) align by default with the left edge... more In Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB), Intermediate Phrases (ips) align by default with the left edge of syntactic phrases. The main intonational cue of ips is partial pitch reset at their left edges. A minimal size constraint applies on ips occurring at the left edge of an Intonational Phrase (IP), requiring that they consist of at least two Accentual Phrases (APs). Following [9]’s idea that certain prominent positions demand augmentation, the NBB facts show that the left edge of an IP can also be a phonologically prominent position.
This paper explores how the notion ‘prosodic head’ comes into play in providing an account for ce... more This paper explores how the notion ‘prosodic head’ comes into play in providing an account for certain facts concerning the distribution of tonal pitch accents in Tokyo Japanese, Standard American and British English, and Northern Bizkaian Basque. Building on evidence from I&M on Tokyo Japanese, it is argued that there is a class of violable phonological markedness constraints on the headedness of prosodic constituents. A class of markedness constraints calling for a prosodic head/abstract prominence to be associated with tone is also motivated. Together, these constraints play a role in accounts of tone epenthesis on prosodic heads or displacement of lexical tone to prosodic heads that are found in both ‘pitch accent languages’ and in ‘intonation languages’. These two prosodic headedness-related constraint types also play a role in accounting for the disappearance of expected phonological phrasing in cases of the absence of tonal ‘accent’ and the related absence of word-level proso...
This paper reviews some well-known facts from TJ and NBB which show that prosodic markedness cons... more This paper reviews some well-known facts from TJ and NBB which show that prosodic markedness constraints have a role to play in determining the phonological domain structure for the tonal and intonational phenomena of sentences in these languages. Facts like these are highly relevant to ongoing debates about the nature of the syntaxphonology interface: the very existence of a role for such constraints tells us that the domain structure for phonological and phonetic phenomena cannot be identified with syntactic constituency itself (contra Arregi 2002, 2006, Wagner 2005, 2010, Pak 2008 and others), but must be an independent prosodic structure. In the view presented here, and elsewhere, the prosodic structure of the surface phonological representation of a sentence is the output of an interaction between markedness constraints on prosodic structure and correspondence constraints which govern the relation between prosodic structure and the syntactic constituent structure that is the ou...
The notion of focus plays a central role in the Basque language. From a syntactic point ofview, t... more The notion of focus plays a central role in the Basque language. From a syntactic point ofview, the order of constituents depends on focus assignment. In the phonological realm, the prosodic shape of the sentence is strongly conditioned by focalization, since the focal accent is the most prominent one in the sentence. This article deals primarily with the prosodic aspects of focalization; that is, focal accent, in the Biscayan variety spoken in Lekeitio. It is argued that, in the Basque variety under study, the sentence has a focus position which must be obligatorily filled. The element that occupies this position receives focal accent. On the other hand, there are elements which cannot receive focal accent, whose properties are studied. Besides localization in simple sentences, some complications that arise in negative clauses, subordinate constructions and sentences with synthetic verbs are also described.
This article is intended as a critical survey of the phonological theories of the syntax-phonolog... more This article is intended as a critical survey of the phonological theories of the syntax-phonology interface. These theories can be divided into two main groups, according to the role they attribute to syntactic representations in creating phonological domains. On the one hand there is the Direct Reference Theory, which claims that phonological operations are directly sensitive to syntactic information, in terms of relations of c-command or m-command (i.e., government) holding between the elements participating in phonological processes. On the other, there is the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory of Prosodic Phonology, which defends the view that syntactic and phonological representations are not isomorphic and that there is a distinct level of representation called Prosodic Structure which contains a hierarchically organized set of prosodic constituents. These constituents are built from syntactic structure by a finite set of parameterized algorithms, and phonological processes refer to p...
Lan honetan Lekeitioko hizkeran menpeko perpausetako azentu nagusia non kokatzen den aztertzen du... more Lan honetan Lekeitioko hizkeran menpeko perpausetako azentu nagusia non kokatzen den aztertzen dugu, asimetria interesgarri bat erakutsiz. -ela perpaus barruan dagoen aditzaren aurreko hitz azentugabeak foku azentua jaso dezakeen bitartean, -en, -enean, -enétik, -elako perpaus barrukoak ezin du azentua eraman. Enpirikoki baieztatu dugu kontrastea gertatu egiten dela, eta kontrastea azaltzeko proposatzen dugu auzia ez datzala osagarri-adjunktu bereizketan, baizik eta zein fase-eremu sintaktikoari eragiten dion azentu ezarketak menpeko perpausetan. Horretarako, iradokitzen dugu -ela izan ezik, beste konplementatzaileak posposiziodunak direla eta, ondorioz, fase desberdinetan ezartzen dela azentua.
This paper examines the phonetics and phonology of intonational boundaries in five Romance langua... more This paper examines the phonetics and phonology of intonational boundaries in five Romance languages/varieties. A typology of the boundary cues used is given, as well as their relative frequency. The phonology of the tonal boundary gesture is described by means of the inventory of nuclear accents used plus their possible combinations with the two dominant end contours: continuation rise (H) and sustained pitch (!H). A detailed inspection of the phonetics of the H boundary tone, which is the main cue observed across languages, is provided: namely, the impact on H scaling of nuclear accent choice, phrase length and first peak height is assessed. Overall, it is shown that the variation found consistently groups languages in two sets: the Catalan-Spanish group and the ItalianEuropean Portuguese group.
In this study, the scaling of utterance-initial f0 values and H initial peaks are examined in sev... more In this study, the scaling of utterance-initial f0 values and H initial peaks are examined in several Romance languages as a function of phrasal length, measured in number of pitch accents (1 to 3 pitch accents) and in number of syllables (3 to 15). The motivation for this study stems from contradictory claims in the literature regarding whether the height of the initial f0 values and peaks is governed by a look-ahead or preplanning mechanism. A total of ten speakers of five Romance language varieties (Catalan, Italian, Standard and Northern European Portuguese, and Spanish) read a total of 3720 declarative utterances (744 utterances per language) of varying length in number of pitch accents and syllables. The data reveal that the majority of speakers tend to begin higher in longer utterances. Results thus confirm recent findings about the need for a certain amount of global preplanning in tonal production ([1], [2]). The failure to find a correlation between phrase length and initi...
It is widely accepted in the literature that Discourse Functional Units (a.k.a. discourse markers... more It is widely accepted in the literature that Discourse Functional Units (a.k.a. discourse markers, connectors, pragmatic particles) often show prosodic properties of separate intonation units and are also phonologically reduced. In this paper we investigate these hypotheses in the use of entonces ‘then’ in spoken Castilian Spanish. Acoustic measurements show that entonces is not an independent prosodic unit in the sense established by [10] and that it appears to be more closely linked to the following proposition than to the preceding one. The F0 contour of entonces is conditioned by the type of argument expressed in the proposition following it. The results also indicate that there is no significant phonological reduction in the use of entonces in the majority of cases.
Based on the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona on September 17-18, 2009, this volume b... more Based on the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona on September 17-18, 2009, this volume brings together researchers working on issues of the prosodic encoding and expression of sentence-level meaning.The contributions to the book resultfroma vivid exchange ofresearch ideas and research methodologies on issues related to the relationship between prosody and meaning andfrom stimulating discussions and collaborative work between researchers coming from different perspectives.
Huarte de San Juan. Filología y Didáctica de la Lengua
En este trabajo describimos los tonemas más frecuentes en enunciados declarativos y en enunciados... more En este trabajo describimos los tonemas más frecuentes en enunciados declarativos y en enunciados interrogativos absolutos y parciales de la fala, lengua galaico-portuguesa hablada en la Sierra de Gata (Cáceres, Extremadura). La fala está compuesta por tres variedades: valverdeiru, lagarteiru y mañegu. Se ha grabado a 12 hablantes en habla conversacional y habla leída. Comparamos los principales tonemas de la fala con las lenguas de su familia, gallego y portugués, y con la lengua de contacto, el castellano. Se distinguen por un lado el valverdeiru, más castellanizado y, por otro, el lagarteiru y el mañegu, con mayor presencia de rasgos galaico-portugueses.
... Beste bi hiztunen joera ez genuen izan aukerarik grabatzeko baina gure belarrietara guztiz ar... more ... Beste bi hiztunen joera ez genuen izan aukerarik grabatzeko baina gure belarrietara guztiz argi zegoen azentuaren kokagunea zein zen eta gure artean adostasun osoa geneukan ... re.kin se.mf.as e.ra.ku.tsi e.ra.ku.tzf i.tu.rrLa itxurrixe / i.txu.rrf.xe pa.lan.ka.ren pa.lan.kin e.tor.ki.zu ...
This study investigates the influence of syntactic branching and constituent length on prosodic b... more This study investigates the influence of syntactic branching and constituent length on prosodic boundary placement in three Iberian languages: Catalan, European Portuguese, and Spanish. The most common phrasing in Catalan is (S)(VO). However, in cases of long branching objects or double-branching objects with non-branching subjects, (SV)(O) phrasings are frequent, due to a tendency to balance the weight and length of the prosodic constituents. Spanish utterances are mainly grouped as (S)(VO), regardless of constituent length or syntactic complexity. In Portuguese, (SVO) is the usual phrasing. Only a long branching subject strongly favors the phrasing (S)(VO), not a short branching subject or a short or long branching object. In the three languages, length rather than syntactic complexity plays a role in boundary placement.
In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has not... more In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has not been discussed in the literature on focus in generative grammar. We refer to a type of answers to wh-questions in which the constituent that fills the variable does not do so exhaustively, that is, it does not provide an exhaustive answer because the speaker cannot commit to asserting that the other potential alternative candidates to fill the variable are cancelled. The type of narrow focus usually discussed in the literature is one in which a constituent fills the variable of the question exhaustively, with a concomitant cancellation of the rest of the focal alternatives. We call these types of narrow focus Non-Exhaustive Narrow Focus (NENF) and Exhaustive Narrow Focus (ENF), respectively. In our experiment, we measured peak scaling and alignment of accents in the subject and the verb in ENF and NENF utterances. The results show that NENF is distinguished from ENF in having a pitch ac...
In Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB), Intermediate Phrases (ips) align by default with the left edge... more In Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB), Intermediate Phrases (ips) align by default with the left edge of syntactic phrases. The main intonational cue of ips is partial pitch reset at their left edges. A minimal size constraint applies on ips occurring at the left edge of an Intonational Phrase (IP), requiring that they consist of at least two Accentual Phrases (APs). Following [9]’s idea that certain prominent positions demand augmentation, the NBB facts show that the left edge of an IP can also be a phonologically prominent position.
This paper explores how the notion ‘prosodic head’ comes into play in providing an account for ce... more This paper explores how the notion ‘prosodic head’ comes into play in providing an account for certain facts concerning the distribution of tonal pitch accents in Tokyo Japanese, Standard American and British English, and Northern Bizkaian Basque. Building on evidence from I&M on Tokyo Japanese, it is argued that there is a class of violable phonological markedness constraints on the headedness of prosodic constituents. A class of markedness constraints calling for a prosodic head/abstract prominence to be associated with tone is also motivated. Together, these constraints play a role in accounts of tone epenthesis on prosodic heads or displacement of lexical tone to prosodic heads that are found in both ‘pitch accent languages’ and in ‘intonation languages’. These two prosodic headedness-related constraint types also play a role in accounting for the disappearance of expected phonological phrasing in cases of the absence of tonal ‘accent’ and the related absence of word-level proso...
This paper reviews some well-known facts from TJ and NBB which show that prosodic markedness cons... more This paper reviews some well-known facts from TJ and NBB which show that prosodic markedness constraints have a role to play in determining the phonological domain structure for the tonal and intonational phenomena of sentences in these languages. Facts like these are highly relevant to ongoing debates about the nature of the syntaxphonology interface: the very existence of a role for such constraints tells us that the domain structure for phonological and phonetic phenomena cannot be identified with syntactic constituency itself (contra Arregi 2002, 2006, Wagner 2005, 2010, Pak 2008 and others), but must be an independent prosodic structure. In the view presented here, and elsewhere, the prosodic structure of the surface phonological representation of a sentence is the output of an interaction between markedness constraints on prosodic structure and correspondence constraints which govern the relation between prosodic structure and the syntactic constituent structure that is the ou...
The notion of focus plays a central role in the Basque language. From a syntactic point ofview, t... more The notion of focus plays a central role in the Basque language. From a syntactic point ofview, the order of constituents depends on focus assignment. In the phonological realm, the prosodic shape of the sentence is strongly conditioned by focalization, since the focal accent is the most prominent one in the sentence. This article deals primarily with the prosodic aspects of focalization; that is, focal accent, in the Biscayan variety spoken in Lekeitio. It is argued that, in the Basque variety under study, the sentence has a focus position which must be obligatorily filled. The element that occupies this position receives focal accent. On the other hand, there are elements which cannot receive focal accent, whose properties are studied. Besides localization in simple sentences, some complications that arise in negative clauses, subordinate constructions and sentences with synthetic verbs are also described.
This article is intended as a critical survey of the phonological theories of the syntax-phonolog... more This article is intended as a critical survey of the phonological theories of the syntax-phonology interface. These theories can be divided into two main groups, according to the role they attribute to syntactic representations in creating phonological domains. On the one hand there is the Direct Reference Theory, which claims that phonological operations are directly sensitive to syntactic information, in terms of relations of c-command or m-command (i.e., government) holding between the elements participating in phonological processes. On the other, there is the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory of Prosodic Phonology, which defends the view that syntactic and phonological representations are not isomorphic and that there is a distinct level of representation called Prosodic Structure which contains a hierarchically organized set of prosodic constituents. These constituents are built from syntactic structure by a finite set of parameterized algorithms, and phonological processes refer to p...
Lan honetan Lekeitioko hizkeran menpeko perpausetako azentu nagusia non kokatzen den aztertzen du... more Lan honetan Lekeitioko hizkeran menpeko perpausetako azentu nagusia non kokatzen den aztertzen dugu, asimetria interesgarri bat erakutsiz. -ela perpaus barruan dagoen aditzaren aurreko hitz azentugabeak foku azentua jaso dezakeen bitartean, -en, -enean, -enétik, -elako perpaus barrukoak ezin du azentua eraman. Enpirikoki baieztatu dugu kontrastea gertatu egiten dela, eta kontrastea azaltzeko proposatzen dugu auzia ez datzala osagarri-adjunktu bereizketan, baizik eta zein fase-eremu sintaktikoari eragiten dion azentu ezarketak menpeko perpausetan. Horretarako, iradokitzen dugu -ela izan ezik, beste konplementatzaileak posposiziodunak direla eta, ondorioz, fase desberdinetan ezartzen dela azentua.
This paper examines the phonetics and phonology of intonational boundaries in five Romance langua... more This paper examines the phonetics and phonology of intonational boundaries in five Romance languages/varieties. A typology of the boundary cues used is given, as well as their relative frequency. The phonology of the tonal boundary gesture is described by means of the inventory of nuclear accents used plus their possible combinations with the two dominant end contours: continuation rise (H) and sustained pitch (!H). A detailed inspection of the phonetics of the H boundary tone, which is the main cue observed across languages, is provided: namely, the impact on H scaling of nuclear accent choice, phrase length and first peak height is assessed. Overall, it is shown that the variation found consistently groups languages in two sets: the Catalan-Spanish group and the ItalianEuropean Portuguese group.
In this study, the scaling of utterance-initial f0 values and H initial peaks are examined in sev... more In this study, the scaling of utterance-initial f0 values and H initial peaks are examined in several Romance languages as a function of phrasal length, measured in number of pitch accents (1 to 3 pitch accents) and in number of syllables (3 to 15). The motivation for this study stems from contradictory claims in the literature regarding whether the height of the initial f0 values and peaks is governed by a look-ahead or preplanning mechanism. A total of ten speakers of five Romance language varieties (Catalan, Italian, Standard and Northern European Portuguese, and Spanish) read a total of 3720 declarative utterances (744 utterances per language) of varying length in number of pitch accents and syllables. The data reveal that the majority of speakers tend to begin higher in longer utterances. Results thus confirm recent findings about the need for a certain amount of global preplanning in tonal production ([1], [2]). The failure to find a correlation between phrase length and initi...
It is widely accepted in the literature that Discourse Functional Units (a.k.a. discourse markers... more It is widely accepted in the literature that Discourse Functional Units (a.k.a. discourse markers, connectors, pragmatic particles) often show prosodic properties of separate intonation units and are also phonologically reduced. In this paper we investigate these hypotheses in the use of entonces ‘then’ in spoken Castilian Spanish. Acoustic measurements show that entonces is not an independent prosodic unit in the sense established by [10] and that it appears to be more closely linked to the following proposition than to the preceding one. The F0 contour of entonces is conditioned by the type of argument expressed in the proposition following it. The results also indicate that there is no significant phonological reduction in the use of entonces in the majority of cases.
Based on the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona on September 17-18, 2009, this volume b... more Based on the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona on September 17-18, 2009, this volume brings together researchers working on issues of the prosodic encoding and expression of sentence-level meaning.The contributions to the book resultfroma vivid exchange ofresearch ideas and research methodologies on issues related to the relationship between prosody and meaning andfrom stimulating discussions and collaborative work between researchers coming from different perspectives.
Huarte de San Juan. Filología y Didáctica de la Lengua
En este trabajo describimos los tonemas más frecuentes en enunciados declarativos y en enunciados... more En este trabajo describimos los tonemas más frecuentes en enunciados declarativos y en enunciados interrogativos absolutos y parciales de la fala, lengua galaico-portuguesa hablada en la Sierra de Gata (Cáceres, Extremadura). La fala está compuesta por tres variedades: valverdeiru, lagarteiru y mañegu. Se ha grabado a 12 hablantes en habla conversacional y habla leída. Comparamos los principales tonemas de la fala con las lenguas de su familia, gallego y portugués, y con la lengua de contacto, el castellano. Se distinguen por un lado el valverdeiru, más castellanizado y, por otro, el lagarteiru y el mañegu, con mayor presencia de rasgos galaico-portugueses.
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