Stress, pitch accent, and beyond: Intonation in Maltese questions

The Autosegmental-Metrical Model of Intonational Phonology

“…In indirect questions (the bottom panel of figure 1c.3), by contrast, the fall occurs on the stressed syllable. This pattern, in which the fall in pitch is on the first syllable in direct questions and on the stressed syllable in indirect questions, was found to be stable across speakers in a production study involving scripted dialogues (Grice, Vella, and Bruggeman 2019). Thus Maltese employs a word-initial tone in direct questions and a tone associating with the lexical stress-in line with other pitch accents in the language-in indirect questions.…”

“…Shaded area indicates the complex question word, ma'min minnhom (With which one of them?). Source: Adapted fromGrice, Vella, and Bruggeman (2019).…”

Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

“…However, prosodic edges appear to be prominent as well in that their position is often privileged, perhaps because they help to parse the signal—as in the case of Taiwanese Southern Min (Ou & Guo, this issue) or Korean (Kember et al, this issue)—making the word boundaries clearer than they would otherwise be. At higher prosodic levels, the coincidence of edge-based prominence is further evidence that the division between head prominence and edge demarcation needs refinement (see, e.g., Grice et al, 2019; Franich, this issue; Luchkina & Cole, this issue; Kember et al, this issue). Although much of intonation research has concentrated on the right edge (the end of words or phrases), some of the studies here point to the importance of the left edge too, as evidenced by the fact that listeners identified words more easily if a word-initial F0 rise was present in the signal (Ou & Guo, this issue) and by the structural prominence of the left edge in Korean (Cho et al, 2011; Kember et al, this issue).…”

Advancements of Phonetics in the 21st century: Quantitative data analysis

“…There are too many ways to extract parameters from curves for a comprehensive list. A parameterisation for intonation contours that is analogous to single-point formant measures is using pre-specified events such as peaks or targets to determine f0 measurement locations (Fletcher and Evans, 2002;Grice et al, 2017Grice et al, , 2019. Other approaches may focus explicitly on dynamics.…”