Production and perception of rhetoricalquestions in Osaka Japanese

Miura, Ichiro; Hara, Noriyo

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(95)80162-6

“…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.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Subglottal pressure and final lowering in English

Herman¹,

Beckman²,

Honda³

1996

4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1996)

3

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Quantitative models of intonation in a variety of languages typically specify a long-range downtrend across the sentence that provides a declining backdrop for the steeper rises and falls of more local pitch events such as accents and word tones. Several studies of this "declination" in English and several other languages have isolated a component of somewhat steeper decline that covers only the last few centiseconds of "lab speech" utterances. Other studies suggest that this "final lowering" may be particular to utterances with a "declarative intonation" pattern, and that it is associated particularly with the ends of discourse units. Thus final lowering seems to be associated pragmatically with a sense of fading off or finality. To see whether final lowering can be attributed in part to a fading off of subglottal pressure, we examined the two measures together in two databases of utterances that varied in intonation contour. To minimize confounds from more local pitch specifications, we looked at the relationship between final lowering and subglottal pressure only in the intonational "tail" -i.e., the portion of the contour after the last pitch accent. The slope of the decline of the subglottal pressure varied as a function of the phonological specification of the tones in the tail. Utterances with declarative intonation or with any other contour sharing the phonological specification of a low tone at the end of the tail consistently showed a decline in subglottal pressure, whereas utterances with "yes-no question intonation" or any other contour sharing the phonological specification of a final high tone showed lesser declines or even increases.

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“…Jun & Oh (1994) show that in Korean, although not all speakers use the same strategy for expressing incredulity, larger pitch range is one of the factors manipulated to distinguish between incredulity questions and wh-questions. Miura & Hara (1995) show that in Osaka Japanese, sentence-initial FO lowering and sentence-final FO raising are some of the characteristics of rhetorical questions, which express disbelief or incredulity.…”

Section: What Does Final Lowering Mean?mentioning

confidence: 90%

Final Lowering in Kipare

Herman

¹

1996

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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.

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“…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.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 55%

Subglottal pressure and final lowering in English

Herman

¹

,

Beckman²,

Honda³

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96

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Quantitative models of intonation in a variety of languages typically specify a long-range downtrend across the sentence that provides a declining backdrop for the steeper rises and falls of more local pitch events such as accents and word tones. Several studies of this "declination" in English and several other languages have isolated a component of somewhat steeper decline that covers only the last few centiseconds of "lab speech" utterances. Other studies suggest that this "final lowering" may be particular to utterances with a "declarative intonation" pattern, and that it is associated particularly with the ends of discourse units. Thus final lowering seems to be associated pragmatically with a sense of fading off or finality. To see whether final lowering can be attributed in part to a fading off of subglottal pressure, we examined the two measures together in two databases of utterances that varied in intonation contour. To minimize confounds from more local pitch specifications, we looked at the relationship between final lowering and subglottal pressure only in the intonational "tail" -i.e., the portion of the contour after the last pitch accent. The slope of the decline of the subglottal pressure varied as a function of the phonological specification of the tones in the tail. Utterances with declarative intonation or with any other contour sharing the phonological specification of a low tone at the end of the tail consistently showed a decline in subglottal pressure, whereas utterances with "yes-no question intonation" or any other contour sharing the phonological specification of a final high tone showed lesser declines or even increases.

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Production and perception of rhetoricalquestions in Osaka Japanese

Cited by 15 publications

References 19 publications

Subglottal pressure and final lowering in English

Subglottal pressure and final lowering in English

Final Lowering in Kipare

Subglottal pressure and final lowering in English

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