Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German
- The influence of information structure on tonal scaling in German is examined experimentally. Eighteen speakers uttered a total of 2277 sentences of the same syntactic structure, but with a varying number of constituents, word order and focus-given structure. The quantified results for German support findings for other Germanic languages that the scaling of high tones, and thus the entire melodic pattern, is influenced by information structure. Narrow focus raised the high tones of pitch accents, while givenness lowered them in prenuclear position and canceled them out postnuclearly. The effects of focus and givenness are calculated against all-new sentences as a baseline, which we expected to be characterized by downstep, a significantly lower scaling of high tones as compared to declination. The results further show that information structure alone cannot account for all variations. We therefore assume that dissimilatory tonal effects play a crucial role in the tonal scaling of German. The effects consist of final f0 drop, a steepThe influence of information structure on tonal scaling in German is examined experimentally. Eighteen speakers uttered a total of 2277 sentences of the same syntactic structure, but with a varying number of constituents, word order and focus-given structure. The quantified results for German support findings for other Germanic languages that the scaling of high tones, and thus the entire melodic pattern, is influenced by information structure. Narrow focus raised the high tones of pitch accents, while givenness lowered them in prenuclear position and canceled them out postnuclearly. The effects of focus and givenness are calculated against all-new sentences as a baseline, which we expected to be characterized by downstep, a significantly lower scaling of high tones as compared to declination. The results further show that information structure alone cannot account for all variations. We therefore assume that dissimilatory tonal effects play a crucial role in the tonal scaling of German. The effects consist of final f0 drop, a steep fall from a raised high tone to the bottom line of the speaker, H-raising before a low tone, and H-lowering before a raised high tone. No correlation between word order and tone scaling could be established. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.…
Verfasserangaben: | Caroline FéryORCiDGND, Frank Kügler |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-46091 |
Publikationstyp: | Postprint |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Erscheinungsjahr: | 2008 |
Veröffentlichende Institution: | Universität Potsdam |
Datum der Freischaltung: | 27.08.2010 |
Freies Schlagwort / Tag: | Contrastive stress; intonation |
Quelle: | Journal of phonetics. - 36 (2008), 4, S. 680 - 703, DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2008.05.001 |
Organisationseinheiten: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC-Klassifikation: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
Name der Einrichtung zum Zeitpunkt der Publikation: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |
Lizenz (Deutsch): | Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz |
Externe Anmerkung: | The article was originally published by Elsevier: Journal of Phonetics. - 36 (2008), S. 680-703 ISSN 0095-4470 DOI 10.1016/j.wocn.2008.05.001 |