St’át'imcets intonation contours: a preliminary study

Abstract

Acoustic research on the prosody and intonation of Northwest Coast languages has until recently been under-researched. This paper joins the growing body of research on the subject and reports on the results of the first study of intonation in St’át'imcets (Lillooet Salish; Northern Interior Salish). It tests the generalization proposed by Davis (2007) that information structure is not correlated with prosody in Salish languages by comparing the intonation contours of declaratives and yes/no questions. Specifically, I ask two questions: is nuclear accent rightmost? And are yes/no questions associated with higher pitch, as predicted by the Universality of Intonational Meaning? Results are comparable to those reported for other Salish languages, namely Koch (2008, 2011) on Nɬeʔkepmxcín, Jacobs (2007) on Skwxwú7mesh and Benner (2004, 2006) and Leonard (2011) on SENĆOŦEN. Nuclear accent is associated with the rightmost stressed vowel, regardless of focus, and while no speaker signals yes/no questions with a final rise, each has higher pitch within typologically common parameters.

Pausing as a prosodic correlate of speech units in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish)

“…The reliability of pausing as a correlate to prosodic, syntactic and discourse units has been debated in commonly-studied languages (outlined, for instance, in [1]). Preliminary research in Nxaʔamxčín (Interior Salish) [2] has shown that pausing could be a more reliable acoustic correlate of discourse structure than pitch, in line with previous research indicating that Salish languages do not exhibit a strong reliance on pitch to mark information structure [3][4][5][6].…”