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Prosodic Variation (with)in Languages

Intonation, Phrasing and Segments

Edited by
Marisa Cruz [+–]
University of Lisbon
Marisa Cruz is a Researcher at the Phonetics and Phonology Lab (CLUL/FLUL), University of Lisbon. She obtained a PhD on prosodic variation in European Portuguese (phrasing, intonation and rhythm) in 2013, in the same institution. She is currently member of the Direction Board of Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon, where she investigates visual prosody in European Portuguese, by comparing the prosodic role of gestures in spoken language with the prosody of Portuguese Sign Language. Her research interests also cover language acquisition and language disorders.
Sónia Frota [+–]
University of Lisbon
Sónia Frota is Full Professor of Experimental Linguistics at the University of Lisbon. Her research seeks to understand the properties of prosodic systems (phrasing, intonation, and rhythm), the extent to which they vary across and within languages, and how they are acquired by infants and help to bootstrap the learning of language. She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics (since 2002), and the Director of the Center of Linguistics at the University of Lisbon (since 2020).

This volume focuses on research on prosodic variation, comprising intonation, prosodic phrasing, and segmental phenomena that are prosodically motivated or constrained, in several languages and language varieties. Besides Portuguese (European, Brazilian, and African varieties), the book covers another three unrelated languages and their varieties: Romanian, Arabic, and Assamese (spoken in India and Bangladesh). Language coverage is thus diverse, including understudied languages/varieties. The approaches followed are both experimental and theoretical. All the chapters share a common goal: to add to the knowledge of prosodic variation in each of the languages and varieties studied, and to contribute to the understanding of prosodic grammar, in general.

Series: Studies in Phonetics and Phonology

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introduction [+–]
Marisa Cruz,Sónia Frota
University of Lisbon
Marisa Cruz is a Researcher at the Phonetics and Phonology Lab (CLUL/FLUL), University of Lisbon. She obtained a PhD on prosodic variation in European Portuguese (phrasing, intonation and rhythm) in 2013, in the same institution. She is currently member of the Direction Board of Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon, where she investigates visual prosody in European Portuguese, by comparing the prosodic role of gestures in spoken language with the prosody of Portuguese Sign Language. Her research interests also cover language acquisition and language disorders.
University of Lisbon
Sónia Frota is Full Professor of Experimental Linguistics at the University of Lisbon. Her research seeks to understand the properties of prosodic systems (phrasing, intonation, and rhythm), the extent to which they vary across and within languages, and how they are acquired by infants and help to bootstrap the learning of language. She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics (since 2002), and the Director of the Center of Linguistics at the University of Lisbon (since 2020).
This volume focuses on research on prosodic variation, comprising intonation, prosodic phrasing, and segmental phenomena that are prosodically motivated or constrained, in several languages and language varieties. Besides Portuguese (European, Brazilian, and African varieties), the book covers another three unrelated languages and their varieties: Romanian, Arabic, and Assamese (spoken in India and Bangladesh). Language coverage is thus diverse, including understudied languages/varieties. The approaches followed are both experimental and theoretical. All the chapters share a common goal: to add to the knowledge of prosodic variation in each of the languages and varieties studied, and to contribute to the understanding of prosodic grammar, in general.

Section I: Intonation

1. Text-tune Alignment in Tunisian Arabic Yes-No Questions [+–]
Sam Hellmuth
University of York
Sam Hellmuth is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. Sam was director and principal investigator of the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded project Intonational Variation in Arabic. Her research seeks to understand the scope of variation observed in the intonational systems of spoken Arabic dialects, and the interaction of intonation in these languages with segmental and metrical phonology, syntax, semantics, and information structure. Sam also works on second language acquisition of prosody, and the prosodic properties of regional dialects of British Englishes and World Englishes.
This paper reveals a pattern of vowel epenthesis in Tunisian Arabic yes-no questions which is – at least partly – prosodically conditioned. In our data, the final nuclear accent in yes-no questions is commonly a (delayed peak) rise followed by a complex boundary tone (analysed here as L*+H H-L%), and, in such tokens, an epenthetic vowel is frequently appended to the last lexical item by some speakers. This pattern of utterance-final vowel epenthesis has not previously been reported in the small literature on Tunisian Arabic intonation, nor in other work on the intonation patterns of neighbouring dialects of Arabic, to the best of our knowledge. Systematic investigation of corpus data reveals that many of the contextual factors which have been shown to condition word-final epenthesis in European Portuguese and Italian do not play a role in the incidence of word-final epenthesis in Tunisian Arabic. Instead, in Tunisian Arabic, the primary conditioning factors for word-final epenthesis are discourse function (yes-no questions) and prosodic contour (complex rise-fall), with a secondary effect of gender (the pattern is produced more frequently by female speakers). The results suggest that the Tunisian Arabic word-final epenthetic vowel is not a case of ‘text- tune’ adjustment, but functions instead as a question particle. The potential historical origins of the pattern, and its current sociolinguistic indexical function, are briefly discussed.
2. Asking Questions across Portuguese Varieties [+–]
Marisa Cruz,Verònica Crespo-Sendra,Joelma Castelo,Sónia Frota
University of Lisbon
Marisa Cruz is a Researcher at the Phonetics and Phonology Lab (CLUL/FLUL), University of Lisbon. She obtained a PhD on prosodic variation in European Portuguese (phrasing, intonation and rhythm) in 2013, in the same institution. She is currently member of the Direction Board of Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon, where she investigates visual prosody in European Portuguese, by comparing the prosodic role of gestures in spoken language with the prosody of Portuguese Sign Language. Her research interests also cover language acquisition and language disorders.
University of Lisbon
Universidade Estadual do Paraná, Brazil
Joelma Castelo is Assistant Professor at the Center of Human Sciences and Education of Universidade Estadual do Paraná, Brazil. Her research focuses on the phonetics and phonology of intonational variation in Portuguese. Her most relevant publications are Variação entoacional dos enunciados interrogativos (Castelo & Cunha, 2015), The yes-no question contour in Brazilian Portuguese (Castelo & Frota, 2017), and The perception of yes-no questions across varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (Castelo et al., 2018).
University of Lisbon
Sónia Frota is Full Professor of Experimental Linguistics at the University of Lisbon. Her research seeks to understand the properties of prosodic systems (phrasing, intonation, and rhythm), the extent to which they vary across and within languages, and how they are acquired by infants and help to bootstrap the learning of language. She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics (since 2002), and the Director of the Center of Linguistics at the University of Lisbon (since 2020).
Recent research on yes-no question intonation in European and Brazilian Portuguese suggests that there is a high variety of nuclear patterns of yes-no questions not only between European and Brazilian varieties but also across European Portuguese varieties (Frota et al. 2015, Silva 2014, Cruz et al. 2014, among others). However, there is a lack of studies that include a detailed description and comparison of yes-no questions in different varieties of Portuguese. The first goal of the current study is to describe the intonation of yes-no questions in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP and BP, respectively) by analyzing a wide range of utterances and regions covered within the project Interactive Atlas of Prosody of Portuguese. Considering the fact that interrogatives can have different pragmatic functions, we decided to analyze yes-no questions also from a pragmatic point of view, thus looking at neutral and focused yes-no questions. Studies have shown that speakers can signal the difference between neutral and focused questions intonationally, in various languages (Frota 2002, Savino & Grice 2007, Lee et al. 2008, Truckenbrodt 2009, Crespo-Sendra 2011). Some studies have found a gradient contrast between the two types of questions, while other studies indicate that the contrast is expressed categorically. Therefore, the aims of this paper are: a) to analyze and compare phonologically the nuclear configuration of neutral and focused yes-no questions across Portuguese varieties; and b) to investigate the strategies that EP and BP speakers use to distinguish between neutral and focalized yes/no questions.
3. High Pre-tonic Falls in Northeastern Brazilian Varieties: May a Prenuclear High Target Spreading Rightward Re-categorize as a Nuclear Leading Tone? [+–]
Marco Barone,Joelma Castelo
Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
Marco Barone is Assistant Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. He is an Italian-Brazilian sociolinguist, phonologist and former mathematician. His research area is intonation change, especially focused on the intonational phonology of varieties of Portuguese and Italian in contact. Currently, he coordinates the Committee for Endangered Languages of the Brazilian Association for Linguistics (ABRALIN).
Universidade Estadual do Paraná, Brazil
Joelma Castelo is Assistant Professor at the Center of Human Sciences and Education of Universidade Estadual do Paraná, Brazil. Her research focuses on the phonetics and phonology of intonational variation in Portuguese. Her most relevant publications are Variação entoacional dos enunciados interrogativos (Castelo & Cunha, 2015), The yes-no question contour in Brazilian Portuguese (Castelo & Frota, 2017), and The perception of yes-no questions across varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (Castelo et al., 2018).
The intonation of northeastern Brazilian Portuguese shows a nuclear falling pitch accent in statements, with a salient high-pretonic rise (Cunha & Colamarco, 2005; Silvestre, 2012), which was labeled in literature as ¡H+L* (Moraes, 2008). This contour was also documented in Recife (PE) and in João Pessoa (PB), through different elicitation tasks, by the authors of the present paper. Four female and two male speakers from Recife aged between 23 and 31, with high school completed, participated in a questionnaire, aimed at eliciting 20 target broad focus statements with a nuclear sentence-final object phrase, varying in syntactic complexity (e.g. compound words, syntactically articulated phrases, phrases with an embedded relative clause) and in number of tone bearing units, distinguishing simple object (1 TBU) from compound object (2 to 5 TBU). Results show that on compound object phrases Recife speakers may use either the hat pattern (39%) or the pre-tonic rise (61%), which is allowed in Pescara only for simple object phrases. The use of the pretonic rise instead of a hat pattern has proven to be sensitive to gender: 79% for women and 37% for men. This suggests that a productive rule PLATEAU > PRETONIC RISE / (if only 1 TBU), similar to Pescara, exists in Recife, but a process of prosodic reanalysis is occurring, led by young female speakers: as the simple object constituents are more frequent, the pre-tonic rise is being applied by analogy to all statements, independently of the number of TBUs, with the reanalysis of the right spreading of the trailing tone of a L+H* prenuclear accent as the leading tone of a nuclear accent.
4. From ToBI Phonological Events to Functional Melodic Forms at the Communicative Level [+–]
Doina Jitca
Institute of Computer Science of Romanian Academy
Doina Jitca is a Scientific Researcher at the Speech Processing Department of the Institute of Computer Science of Romanian Academy – Iasi Branch, Romania. Intonation modeling is her domain of interest, having recently published the following contributions for this research field: Information Packaging correlates of Semantic Information Structure Categories (Jitca, 2020), and A Cognitive View on Romance Yes-No Question Contours (Jitca, 2022).
The paper proposes an intonational description which uses functional pitch contour elements relevant at the information structure (IS) level. A hierarchical view transforms utterances into hierarchies of communicative units (CUs) with own IS. The proposed intonational analysis consists in the utterance partitioning into information packaging units (CUs) and in applying functional labels to the CU constituents in order to describe the IS of all CUs within the utterance hierarchy.

Section II: Prosodic Phrasing and Segments

5. Prosody of Contrastive Focus in Two Varieties of Assamese [+–]
Asim I. Twaha,Shakuntala Mahanta
Barnagar College, Sorbhog under Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India
Asim. I. Twaha is Assistant Professor of English at Barnagar College, Sorbhog under Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India. His field of specialization is phonology, and the majority of his publications are in the areas of prosody, intonational phonology, and acoustic phonetics. He received a Teacher’s fellowship from the University Grants Commission, India, to pursue his doctoral degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (2013- 2016).  He is enthusiastic about exploring the phonology of post-lexical domains in different languages or language varieties. 
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India
Shakuntala Mahanta is Full Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. She specialized in phonology and her research interests and publications are mostly in the domains and intersections of theoretical phonology (Optimality Theory), acoustic phonetics, perception, prosody, as well as endangered languages. By virtue of being in Northeast India she takes a keen interest on various aspects of phonetics and phonology of the languages of Northeast India and has also published on the endangered languages of the region.
In this paper we have studied the prosodic aspect of how Contrastive focus (henceforth CF) is marked in SCA (Standard Colloquial Assamese) and NVA (Nalbariya Variety of Assamese), two varieties of Assamese, a head-final eastern Indo-Aryan language (Goswami, 1982) with SOV as canonical word order. In our study we have found that these two varieties employ the same pitch accent (L*+H) and boundary tone (HP) to demarcate both focused and non-focused phrases; the final phrase (verb) cannot be focused. When the phrase length is limited to two to three syllables, the trailing tone of the pitch accent is left unrealized, and pitch pattern becomes L*HP. A focused phonological phrase differs from a non-focused one in terms of increased pitch range [(F0max at the right boundary – F0min at the first syllable)]. Following Ladd’s Free Gradient Hypothesis (Ladd, 1994; Gussenhoven, 1999), we propose here that in SCA and NVA pitch range is used in a categorically distinct way rather than in a gradient way. Similar to the phonological implementation of pitch range in the languages like Catalan (Borras-Comes, Vanrell, & Prieto, 2014), English (Ladd D. R., 1994; 1996), Spanish (Prieto, 2004) among others, pitch range may potentially be represented phonologically in the Assamese varieties.
6. Intonational Phrasing and Nuclear Configurations of SVO Sentences across Varieties of Portuguese [+–]
Flaviane Fernandes-Svartman,Nádia Barros,Vinícius dos Santos,Joelma Castelo
Universidade de São Paulo
Universidade de Lisboa
Universidade de São Paulo
Universidade Estadual do Paraná, Brazil
Joelma Castelo is Assistant Professor at the Center of Human Sciences and Education of Universidade Estadual do Paraná, Brazil. Her research focuses on the phonetics and phonology of intonational variation in Portuguese. Her most relevant publications are Variação entoacional dos enunciados interrogativos (Castelo & Cunha, 2015), The yes-no question contour in Brazilian Portuguese (Castelo & Frota, 2017), and The perception of yes-no questions across varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (Castelo et al., 2018).
Building on previous work, the current study contributes to the comparison and knowledge of variation in romance languages, with the major goal of mirroring prosodic variation in an intra and interlinguistic perspective.
7. Hiatus Resolution across words in European Portuguese Dialects [+–]
Nuno Paulino,Pedro Oliveira,Marina Vigário
Universidade de Lisboa
University of Lisbon
Pedro Oliveira is a Researcher at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Medical School, Centro de Linguística, University of Lisbon.
Universidade de Lisboa
This chapter focuses on hiatus resolution processes across Portuguese dialects, extending the authors’ observation of central vowels’ hiatus when V2 is stressed to hiatus formed by other vowels and in varying stress conditions (Oliveira, Paulino, Cruz & Vigário 2014; Paulino & Frota, 2014).

ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781781794685
Price (Hardback)
£90.00 / $120.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781800501478
Price (eBook)
Individual
£90.00 / $120.00
Institutional
£90.00 / $120.00
Publication
01/04/2022
Pages
256
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
scholars
Illustration
99 figures, numerous tables

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