Final Lowering in Kipare

Abstract

In many languages, fundamental frequency shows a marked decrease utterance-finally or phrase-finally. Ladefoged (1982) generalises that ‘in nearly all languages the completion of a grammatical unit such as a normal sentence is signaled by a falling pitch’. Bolinger (1978) also writes that ‘the most widely diffused intonational phenomenon seems to be the tendency to “go down at the end”’. These sorts of abrupt decreases which affect only the end of the utterance (known as FINAL LOWERING) are distinct from gradual decreases in fundamental frequency over the course of the entire utterance (known as DECLINATION). Bolinger (1978) notes the same distinction, characterising it as the difference between ‘a rapid downward motion at the very end, usually if not always associated with a terminal accent’ and ‘downward drift from a high beginning’. Final lowering as distinct from declination is documented in Japanese by Poser (1984) and by Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988); in English by Liberman & Pierrehumbert (1984); in Dutch by Gussenhoven & Rietveld (1988); in Danish by Thorsen (1985); in Yoruba by Connell & Ladd (1990) and by Laniran (1992); and in Kikuyu by Clements & Ford (1981) (although not all authors use the exact terminology presented here).Analyses of final lowering range from attributing final lowering to changes in tonal categories (discussed below in §4) to attributing final lowering to compression of the pitch range in the last section of the sentence (discussed below in §5.1). Tone languages provide an interesting testing ground for analyses of final lowering. Careful experimental study, controlling for the position of a tone from the beginning and from the end of a sentence, is one way to begin to sort out the effects of various factors such as declination and final lowering on fundamental frequency.

Subglottal pressure and final lowering in English

“…The reduced pitch range associated with lesser vocal effort, then, signals lesser speaker involvment or emotional disengagement. Previous studies have documented the manipulation of global pitch range as a linguistic device to differentiate such meanings as the "incredulity" versus the "uncertainty" interpretation of contour type 2 of our first corpus [16] and incredulous rhetorical versus unmarked yes-no question intrepretations of sentence final rising configurations [8,17]. Our results suggest that final lowering is a shorter term use of this same device.…”

“…One component of the downtrend that has been identified in this way is "final lowering", a decline in backdrop pitch range for the last few centiseconds of declaratives [6,7,8], with more drastic decline indicating a stronger discourse disjuncture [9,10]. Given its apparent connection to declarative intonations and the discourse function of indicating topic finality, it seems plausible to think of final lowering as a linguistically meaningful "fade-out" -i.e., a somewhat shorter-term version of the change in global F0 level that occurs when the talker manipulates overall loudness.…”

Parallel Encoding of Focus and Interrogative Meaning in Mandarin Intonation

“…Hirschberg and Ward [1992, p. 250] showed that pitch range plays the largest role in interpreting the rise-fall-rise contour (L* ϩ H L H% in ToBI's transcription), with larger pitch ranges indicating incredulity and smaller ones indicating uncertainty. Herman [1996] reported that in Kipare (a Bantu tone language), statements are signalled by nonexpanded pitch range with final lowering, yes/no questions by expanded pitch range with final lowering, and incredulous questions by expanded pitch range with final raising. Jun and Oh [1996] suggested that for some Korean speakers, incredulity questions (echo questions expressing incredulity) are distinguished from wh-questions by a larger pitch range, higher amplitude, and boundary tones.…”

Phonological influences on the realization of final lowering evidence from dialogue Chinese Mandarin

“…Another support is its connection with dec1aratives. In Kipare, fmal lowering was found absent in sentences meant to show incredulity [12]. The third is its potential link to focus encoding, more specifically, the post focus compression [15,16].…”

“…Final lowering, indicating an additional lowering near the end of the utterance, has been found in a variety of languages with very different prosodic systems, such as English [1-3], Greek [2], Danish [4], Dutch [5], Yoruba [6,7], Spanish [8], German [9], Japanese [10,11], Kipare [12] and Chinese [13]. Despite the discovery of final lowering effect in widespread languages, it still remains disputable whether its origin is physiological, phonological or paralinguistic.…”