Prosodic Typology

This study presents two experiments aimed at investigating tune-to-text alignment and pitch scaling in Lifou French, a variety spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu. Descriptions of New Caledonian French have focussed on language use of European descendants or the variety spoken in the urban region, neglecting emergent varieties spoken by the indigenous population in rural areas, like the island Lifou. Due to the reduced inventory of pitch accents, dialectal variation in French intonation has proved to be difficult to detect, which has led to the assumption that French has a relatively homogeneous intonation system across its varieties. This study shows that fine-grained phonetic differences in speaking tempo and at the level of tonal alignment as well as in the scaling of AP-final peaks can be attributed to dialectal variation.

The chapter discusses phonetic, phonological, evolutionary, and typological properties of two particular features in the vanishing Udihe language (Tungusic): vowel aspiration and glottalisation. In their evolution, traced from the end of the 19 th century to the 2000s, two main aspects are distinguished: (1) a qualitative evolution from consonants to vowel features and word-prosodic features and (2) a loss of the syllabic boundary between two short vowels, where the original consonants occurred. While aspiration is nearly lost, glottalisation can now be occasionally realised as a pitch dip within a long vowel. The latter realisations do not, however, necessarily imply the transformation of glottalisation into a lexical pitch-accent or tone. They rather represent an articulatory target undershoot, which is at least partially induced by the process of language loss and the influence of "lax" Russian articulation. On the other hand, Udihe glottalisation has already accumulated enough word-prosodic features to permit also a phonological analysis as a glottal prosody, typologically similar to Danish stød and lexical laryngeal prosodies in some Otomanguean languages. In spite of a potential for further word-prosodic development, glottalisation is likely to be lost, in the same way as aspiration. This pathway is suggested by the pressure of the dominating Russian language which lacks such features.

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
"

Guro, a richly tonal language of Côte d’Ivoir, presents some challenges for the Match Theory (a recent development of the theories of Prosodic Hierarchy) which implies a strict correspondence between prosodic and morphosyntactic units starting from the lexical level. Guro exhibits a ‘featural’ foot, which is not based on metrical stress. However, this is only an emerging prosodic domain: the language is characterised by ongoing intensive ‘footisation’ and monosyllabification processes which constantly change the shapes of morphosyntactic units. The degree of footisation depends on the degree of idiomaticity of a particular morphosyntactic construction, along a continuum from morpheme combinations to free phrases, i.e. essentially on a semantic parameter.
There is also another prosodic domain relevant at the lexical level: the domain of morphonological tonal change. As shown by example of di- and trisyllabic nouns, the two prosodic domains tend to be aligned with each other and with the morphosyntactic word, but this is not a strict rule.

The paper analyses existing moraic conceptions of Estonian quantity. Main features of functional, generative and phonetically-instructed moraic accounts of Estonian are considered. In most generative accounts, morae simultaneously represent several layers of functionally and structurally diverse information. This brings along a considerable increase in formal analytical machinery and internal controversies. In a structural functional framework, morae can be used to formalise the prosodic contrast of long and short stressed syllables in Estonian. Its relevance is traced in actual functioning of the prosodic system. This contrast is built upon the segmental contrast of short and long phonemes and, in turn, serves as a basis for a contrast of two distinctive foot accents, light and heavy. As an example, a formal morphonological algorithm of calculating Estonian foot accents, which also shows the place of a syllable weight contrast, is proposed in the paper.

11.1 Introduction This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. We will review the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, with particular attention to the range of variability within a common structural core, and then propose an initial codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure in two standard varieties and one regional variety of the language. Before we begin, however, we must at least pose two important prior questions. First, is a Pan-Mandarin ToBI feasible? Second, if feasible, is it desirable? The first question arises because of the sheer size of the language. Mandarin is spoken as a first or second language by well over a billion people. Furthermore, it has had a long history of being spoken over large geographical areas as a standard language or as a local language. As a result, Mandarin encompasses many different varieties, including three national standards (Guoyu in Taiwan, Putonghua in Mainland China, and ...

This dissertation is about the synchronic analysis, typology, and formal learnability of tonal reassociation. Tonal reassociation refers to a group of phonological phenomena where a lexical tone surfaces in positions that the tone did not occupy underlyingly, without an apparent phonological trigger for doing so. Linguistic theory must answer why and how the grammar determines surface targets for reassociation. In addition, it must account for the crosslinguistic variation of such patterns.

To address this, the dissertation develops an analytical framework based on the interaction between tone and foot structure. Feet function as licensors for tone, driving and restraining tonal reassociation. Since many reassociation patterns involve ternary domains, the framework extends traditional binary feet theory by allowing layered, ternary feet. Grammar computation is modeled in Harmonic Serialism, which solves an opacity problem found for Optimality Theory.

The first half of the book motivates the framework through case studies of ternary spread-and-shift in Saghala, and quantity-sensitive ternary tone spread in Copperbelt Bemba. The framework accounts for both cases, and it is argued that layered feet are crucial to this success.

A third study investigates the typology predicted by the foot-based approach. The approach accounts for much or all of the considered variation, but also shows overgeneration. The fourth study accounts for the overgeneration by considering the learnability of foot-based analyses for reassociation patterns in Optimality Theory. Attested patterns are learnable, and more easily so than unattested ones, under the condition that learners consider production and comprehension errors in tandem.

This chapter describes the prosodic structure of verbs in three polysynthetic languages of northern Australia: Bininj Gun-wok, Murrinhpatha and Ngalakgan. Verbs in these languages have mixed grammatical word/phrase characteristics, and prosodic constituency reflects these grammatical properties in interesting ways. In all three languages, phrasal accents are anchored to the edges of prosodic words, and provide the only clear form of prosodic prominence. I take a parsimonious approach to prosodic constituency, preferring the smallest possible number of constituent levels, and assuming no particular constituent level (e.g. metrical feet) to be universal. This results in a relatively sparse prosodic hierarchy for Australian polysynthetic languages, in contrast to the multiple verb-internal levels proposed for some other polysynthetic languages (e.g. Schiering et al. 2010; Uchihara 2018).

Broken tone appears in the Finnic varieties once spoken in the territory of Latvia. The acoustic characteristics of broken tone have been analysed in Livonian. Some examples of broken tone have been recently described in Leivu South Estonian. Here examples of words pronounced with broken tone in both Leivu and Lutsi South Estonian are analysed. Leivu and Lutsi were spoken in eastern Latvia. Analysed words have been taken from sound recordings made in the 1960s and 1970s. Acoustic analysis shows that broken tone appears mainly in these South Estonian dialects as a trace of historical h between vowels of the 1st and 2nd syllables. Synchronically, it is a quality of long vowels found primarily in stressed syllables. The correlates of broken tone are an abrupt dip in intensity, fall in fundamental frequency, and also laryngealization. In the article we will describe acoustic characteristics of broken tone in Leivu and Lutsi data more thoroughly.

This paper is an attempt to test PENTA, an articulatory-functional model, on Persian focus prosody. The test was done on a corpus consisting of utterances with different focus conditions using PENTAtrainer2, a trainable prosody synthesizer that optimizes categorical pitch targets each corresponding to multiple communicative functions. The evaluation was done by comparing the F0 contours generated by the extracted pitch targets to those of natural utterances through numerical and perceptual evaluations. The numerical results showed that the synthesized F0 was close to the natural contour in terms of RMSE (= 1.94) and Pearson’s r (= 0.84). Perceptual evaluation showed that the rate of focus identification and naturalness judgement by native Persian listeners were highly similar between synthetic and natural F0 contours.

This paper investigates the realization of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Lifou French by bilingual speakers of Drehu and French. In French prominence is marked within a phrasal domain and the AP represents the lowest tonally marked prosodic constituent. Although still controversial, increasingly, there have been contributions arguing for a further prosodic level, the intermediate phrase (ip) between the AP and the Intonation Phrase (IP). In this study, it is shown that Lifou French uses the same tonal patterns as found for Standard French. Additionally , further evidence for the existence of another prosodic level after the AP is found. However, while in Standard French an increased F0 rise and final vowel lengthening have been shown to mark the ip-boundary, an expanded pitch span represents the more salient cue to mark this in Lifou French.

The paper presents a pioneering analysis of the yes/no interrogative intonation of Satipo Ashaninka, a highly synthetic Kampa Arawak language spoken by approximately 10, 000 people in the Satipo Province of Peru. The study demonstrates the diversity of the Satipo Ashaninka interrogative intonation types, most of which are combined with the language's morphosyntactic resources. Yes/no interrogative intonation types comprise low and high right edge boundary tones. The results confirm the findings of other studies across synthetic indigenous languages by providing evidence that yes/no interrogative intonation does not necessarily have a rising pitch contour.

"""This paper investigates the prosodic structure of weak (stressless) function words in Persian within the framework of Prosodic Phonology. Weak function words in Persian are prosodic clitics that form phrases with the material following them (proclitics) or preceding them (enclitics). So far, only the prosody of enclitics has been studied in the literature. The present study proposes that, in Persian, enclitics are affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. These proposals contribute to the findings in Prosodic Phonology that prosodic categories can in fact be recursive and non-exhaustive.

Publisherʼs version downloadable at:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:657354""""

This study investigates prosodic correlates of phrasing in Drehu, an Oceanic language from New Caledonia. The analysis is concerned with the demarcation of prosodic levels in the language, namely the Accentual Phrase and the Intonation Phrase. First impressionistic descriptions of Drehu state there is fixed word initial stress, however recent experimental evidence does not support this claim. Instead, it has been suggested that Drehu could be an edge-marking language which relies on right boundary marking. To determine whether the patterns recorded in the literature are borne out, the phonological and phonetic realisation of post-lexical word level prosody is investigated. An experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which fundamental frequency (F0) and duration contribute to boundary marking in Drehu. The results show that F0 cues mark the right boundary of two prosodic levels, the AP and IP, and that the strength of the boundary is related to its level in the prosodic hierarchy. Preboundary lengthening also cues IP boundaries but not AP boundaries.

"Dec 21, 2010. [Italian] «La parola metrica. Studio linguistico dei nessi ortotonica-appositiva attraverso il miceneo e i grammatici antichi».
First it is an orthographic and linguistic-prosodic analysis of enclisis and proclisis (the appositives) in the whole Pylos and Knossos Linear B tablets, with an appendix about Cypriot Syllabic script. Finally, it is a commented presentation of text from the ancient Greek scholars about accentuation."

Кулешов Вяч. С. Ливская акцентная система // Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. Труды Института лингвистических исследований РАН. Т. VIII. Ч. 1. Fenno-Lapponica Petropolitana / Ответственный редактор Н. Н. Казанский. Ответственный редактор выпуска Н. В. Кузнецова. СПб.: Наука, 2012. — С. 104–131.

We address overgeneration in a factorial typology of metrical tone systems from previous work. We show that learnability in GLA explains the overgeneration: undesirable predicted patterns are harder to learn. The result rests crucially on the assumptions of bidirectional learning and exclusion of harmonically bounded candidates.

This paper proposes an approach to bounded tone shift and spread in Bantu lan-
guages. Its core intuition is that the bounding domain is delimited by foot structure. The approach uses layered foot representations to capture ternary phenomena, following Martínez-Paricio and Kager (forthcoming). A set of licensing and structural constraints regulate tone-feet interactions. Harmonic Serialism is adopted as the grammatical framework, to allow for an account of opaque patterns (Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy 2010).

The present approach improves on previous accounts in two ways. Firstly, the
size of the tonal bounding domain follows from independently motivated foot representations, rather than being stipulated in the constraint set. Secondly, the approach obviates the need for markedness constraints that refer to underlying structure, because all relevant lexical information is reflected in foot structures.

The approach is demonstrated on Saghala (Patin 2009). Saghala shows both shift
and spread in a trisyllabic domain. There are six tone patterns, dependent on the contact or near-contact of tones, and the position of word boundaries. An analysis is presented which accounts for all patterns. The success of the analysis shows that the foot-based approach is equipped to deal with a variety of bounded tone phenomena.

This paper discusses the prosody of Naxi, Yongning Na and Laze, three Sino-Tibetan languages of the Naish subgroup. These three languages have three level tones (High, Mid and Low). Level tones are not unattested in China and Southeast Asia, but have received somewhat less attention than the phonetically complex tones typically found in Sinitic and other families in the area. The study of level-tone systems in Asia appears as a promising field of research, now still in an early stage of development. Central issues concern these languages' place in prosodic typology, and the ways in which intonation interacts with level tones. The paper explains how answers to these questions gradually emerged. The three languages considered here illustrate the great diversity of situations that one may expect to encounter in the field: the tones of Laze and Yongning Na fall squarely in the level-tone type, whereas Naxi is somewhat of an outlier among level-tone systems.

La présente contribution récapitule certaines avancées majeures réalisées dans l'étude des systèmes tonals d'Asie orientale, et discute leurs implications pour la typologie tonale et la modélisation phonologique. Les travaux phonologiques et typologiques accordent une place relativement limitée aux langues dans lesquelles les tons ne sont pas définis simplement en termes de hauteur, et ne se prêtent pas à une décomposition en niveaux tonals (par exemple le tamang et le vietnamien). Ces langues manquent assurément d'attrait au plan morpho-phonologique, étant dénuées d'alternances tonales. Elles n'en présentent pas moins une complexité bien réelle, qui doit être prise en considération dans la modélisation phonologique et les généralisations typologiques. Le panorama présenté ici ramène à une distinction proposée il y a plus d'un demi-siècle (Pike 1948) entre deux types d'organisation tonale : d'une part les systèmes de tons ponctuels*, d'autre part les systèmes de tons complexes*. Pour approfondir cette distinction synchronique, une attention particulière est accordée à l'évolution des systèmes tonals : les faits d'évolution sont en effet d'excellents révélateurs de la nature des systèmes phonologiques.
This contribution recapitulates major findings about East Asian languages to discuss general issues of tonal typology, diachronic evolution and phonological modeling. Relatively little attention has been paid to Far Eastern languages in which linguistic tone cannot simply be equated with pitch, or be decomposed into tonal levels, such as Tamang or Vietnamese. These languages are admittedly somewhat unattractive for phonologists, since they lack tonal alternations. However, they clearly need to be taken into account in phonological modeling and typological generalizations – and they present highly interesting complexities of their own. The conclusion which emerges in light of a synchronic and diachronic survey is very close to a point of view expressed more than half a century ago (Pike 1948), namely that there exists a major typological divide between two types of tonal organization: (i) level-tone systems and (ii) complex-tone systems. With a view to drawing all the implications of this divide, special attention is devoted to the evolution of tonal systems: diachronic facts provide precious insights into the nature of phonological systems.

Clause chains are a syntactic strategy for combining multiple clauses into a single unit. They are reported in many languages, including Korean and Turkish. However, they have seen relatively little focused research. In particular, prosodic features are often mentioned in descriptions of clause chaining, however there have been vanishingly few investigations. Corpus-based studies of the prosody of clause chains in two unrelated languages of Papua New Guinea report that they are typically produced as a sequence of Intonation phrases united by pitchscaling of the L% boundary tones in each clause with only the final, finite, clause descending to a full L%. The present study is the first experimental investigation of the prosody of clause chains in Pitjantjatjara. This paper focuses on one type of clause chain found in the Australian Indigenous language Pitjantjatjara. We examine a set of 120 clause chains read out by three native Pitjantjatjara speakers. Prosodic analysis reveals that these Pitjantjatjara clause chains are produced within a single Intonational Phrase. Speakers do not pause between the clauses in the chain, there is consistent linear downstep throughout the phrase and additionally phrase final lowering occurs at the end of the utterance. This differs from previous impressionistic studies of the prosody of clause chains.

I propose that pronominal enclitics in Caribbean Spanish are suffixes, not clitics.  Most of the evidence supports the claim that enclitics accommodate to word-internal rules of stress and other requirements on phonemic sequences in words.  Data from Caribbean, Peninsular, and New Mexican Spanish will be used to sustain these claims.
Our research describes prosodic and syntactic phenomena characteristic of monosyllabic unstressed oblique/reflexive pronouns (i.e., pronominal clitics), which in Spanish seem to satisfy, on their own, subcategorization requirements of verbs.
I argue that each of these clitics has a twofold representation in the grammar: a clitic form, and an affixal form.  Moreover, affixal forms appear in a fixed position in the word, to the right of the verbal stem (or root), or as they have been called: enclitic.  Clitic forms precede the verb (proclitic) and usually -using the criteria that every word should have primary stress assigned- constitue a word with it.

11.1 Introduction This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. We will review the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, with particular attention to the range of variability within a common structural core, and then propose an initial codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure in two standard varieties and one regional variety of the language. Before we begin, however, we must at least pose two important prior questions. First, is a Pan-Mandarin ToBI feasible? Second, if feasible, is it desirable? The first question arises because of the sheer size of the language. Mandarin is spoken as a first or second language by well over a billion people. Furthermore, it has had a long history of being spoken over large geographical areas as a standard language or as a local language. As a result, Mandarin encompasses many different varieties, including three national standards (Guoyu in Taiwan, Putonghua in Mainland China, and ...