Surface and Structure: Transcribing Intonation within and across Languages

Abstract

Intonation is the phonologically structured variation in phonetic features, primarily pitch, to express phrase-level meanings. As in other speech sound domains, analyzing intonation involves mapping continuously variable physical parameters to categories. The categories of intonation are organized in a set of relations and rule-governed distributions that define the intonation system of a language. From physical realizations, as shown by pitch tracks, surface or phonetic tonal patterns can be identified in terms of tonal targets. Whether surface patterns correspond or not to categories within a given intonation system requires looking at their distributions and contrastiveness. In this paper, I assume the view that a transcription is an analysis of the intonation system, which ultimately aims to identify the contrastive intonation categories of a given language and establish how they signal meaning. Under this view, it is crucial to discuss the ways surface pitch patterns and structural pitch patterns (or phonological categories) are related. Given that intonational analysis is driven by system-internal considerations and that cues to a given category can vary across languages, it is also important to address the issue of how a language-specific transcription can be reconciled with the need and ability to do cross-language comparison of intonation. Bearing on these two issues, I discuss surface and structure in intonational analysis, drawing on mismatches between (dis)similarities in the phonetics and phonology of pitch contours, across languages and language varieties.

Cue-based annotation and analysis of prosodic boundary events

“…This system is not intended to supplant categorical prosodic annotation systems, but to enhance them by showing the concrete ways in which speakers signal categories, and how these cues are interpreted by listeners. Indeed, in agreement with previous proposals [4,13], we believe that the essential goals of prosodic transcription are to identify the contrastive linguistic categories of spoken utterances, and not merely the salient aspects of the surface form. On this cue-based view, the transcription of an utterance has two important levels: 1) the observable acoustic cues to the features of its constituents, and 2) the abstract sound categories that are signalled by those cues and that define the contrastive categories that underlie the utterance.…”

Analytical Decisions in Intonation Research and the Role of Representations: Lessons from Romani

“…Differences between systems arise for two reasons: first, melodies that are similar in form and function may still show differences substantial enough to warrant distinct representations; second, distinct representations may be required for the sake of analytical consistency. The former type is illustrated by Frota (2016), regarding the rise-fall contour associated with narrow focus in both Portuguese and Catalan. Frota shows that, despite superficial similarities, both production and perception data indicate that the former is an off-ramp H*+L and the latter an on-ramp L+H* pitch accent.…”

“…Gussenhoven, 2007), and (iii) acceptance of what Arvaniti and Ladd (2009, p. 63) have called "lawful variability" (cf. Cangemi & Grice, 2016;Cole & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2016;Frota, 2016). Each of these elements is discussed in detail below.…”

Towards an International Prosodic Alphabet (IPrA)

“…Whether at a deeper, phonological level the vocative contour should be represented in the same manner in these three languages as in the other languages remains an open question. Frota (2016) describes ways to reconcile system-internal considerations in phonological analyses of intonation with the need to carry out cross-language comparisons by discussing data from different Romance languages (Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, and Spanish).…”