Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

Abstract

In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements.

Mapping prosody onto meaning – the case of information structure in American English

“…In other words, listeners may be sensitive to prosodic cues, while recognising ambiguity in the mapping back to the speakerintended meaning. Accumulating evidence reveals that intonation is characterised by a many-tomany-mapping between prosodic form and discourse function (Cangemi et al, 2015;Chodroff & Cole, 2018;Cruttenden, 1986;Grice et al, 2017;Peppé et al, 2000;Roettger, 2017, Turnbull, 2017. Specific prosodic forms are probabilistically associated with certain discourse functions.…”

“…Language users have access to this knowledge which is reflected in (discretely) variable speech production patterns (one and the same speaker uses discretely different phonological forms to signal the same meaning) which results in observed flexibility in the comprehension of prosodically encoded discourse meaning in the lab (e.g. Grice et al, 2017;Roettger, 2017;.…”

“…Some speakers produced different pitch accents for the same focus category and other speakers produced one and the same pitch accent for different focus categories. Similarly, Roettger (2017) shows that speakers of Tashlhiyt Berber can prosodically encode questions and contrastive statements with a rise-fall in pitch on the phrase-final word. This tonal event can either occur on the final or prefinal syllable.…”

The tune drives the text - Competing information channels of speech shape phonological systems

“…described several examples of changes to the text that were conditional on specific pragmatic contexts (and their accompanying tune requirements). For example, in polar questions, speakers of Tashlhiyt (Roettger, 2017) or Tunisian Arabic (Hellmuth, in press) produced more inserted non-lexical vowels than in other sentence modalities. Language users might not encounter these cases frequently enough to generalize them.…”

Evidential Strength of Intonational Cues and Rational Adaptation to (Un‐)Reliable Intonation

“…An outstanding question, however, concerns the ubiquitous variability in how individual speakers map tonal events onto discourse meaning. A large body of evidence suggests that, even in the absence of contextual factors, speakers' intonational encoding of discourse functions varies; that is, speakers sometimes produce categorically different tonal events for the same discourse function and they sometimes produce one and the same tonal event for different discourse functions (e.g., for German: Cangemi, Kr€ uger, & Grice (2015), Grice, Ritter, Niemann, & Roettger (2017), for English: Chodroff & Cole (2018), Clopper & Smiljanic (2011), Ito, Speer, & Beckman (2004), Pepp e, Maxim, & Wells (2000), Turnbull (2017), or for Berber: Roettger (2017)).…”