Alignment of tonal targets: 30 years on

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Alignment of tonal targets 30 years on

• Bob Ladd
• University of Edinburgh

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(No Transcript)
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• Bruce, Gösta (1977). Swedish Word Accents in
  Sentence Perspective. (Lund).
• Ladd, D. Robert (1978, published 1980). The
  Structure of Intonational Meaning Evidence from
  English. (Cornell).

• Pierrehumbert, Janet (1980). The Phonology and
  Phonetics of English Intonation. (MIT).

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Gösta or Bob?
(mid-1980s)
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Acknowledgements

• My collaborators Amalia Arvaniti, Michaela
  Atterer, Ineke Mennen, Caterina Petrone, Astrid
  Schepman, Rebekah Stackhouse, and Laurence White,
  who are partly responsible for some of the
  results I summarise here.
• The UK Economic and Social Research Council and
  the British Academy, which funded some of the
  research reported here.
• Carlo Ladd, for expert assistance with the
  PowerPoint presentation.

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Symposium On the 3rd of January 2007, Professor
Gösta Bruce will celebrate his 60th birthday. To
mark the occasion, the Department of Linguistics
and Phonetics will host a one-day symposium on
the theme "Word Accents and Tones in Sentence
Perspective". Gösta Bruce is one of the most
internationally well-known researchers in the
field of prosody. His doctoral dissertation
Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective
(Lund University, 1977) was theoretically and
methodologically
as regards our way of analysing and understanding
prosodic phenomena. The current
symposium aims at bringing together researchers
in the area of prosody to focus on and discuss
the state of our knowledge as it relates to
phonetic and phonological patterning of word
accents and tones when they are concatenated in
utterances.
groundbreaking
His insight that
intonational contours in Swedish could be broken
down into different tonal components word
accents, sentence accent (associated with focus)
and terminal juncture (boundary tones) which
realize different combinations of two
phonological level tones H and L was a seminal
contribution to our understanding of intonational
patterning that was subsequently applied to many
other languages.
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Göstas key contributions?

• linear analysis of pitch contours into
  pragmatically and grammatically distinct types of
  elements
• phonological description of pitch level expressed
  in terms of local maxima and minima

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Autosegmental-Metrical Theory

• Pitch accent (Bolinger)
• Metrical structure (Liberman)
• Phrase accent two-level pitch phonology (Bruce)

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sentence accent rise
terminal juncture fall
word accent fall
ACCENT I
sentence accent rise
ACCENT II
terminal juncture fall
word accent fall
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• reaching a certain pitch level at a particular
  point in time is the important thing, not the
  movement (rise or fall) itself (Bruce 1977
  132).

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More key contributions!

• Pitch events defined independently of syllables
• ALIGNMENT of pitch events and segmental string is
  a useful parameter of phonetic description.

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• Malmberg draws the conclusion that there is a
  relevant opposition between a pronounced fall in
  the first syllable of Accent 1 and a slight rise
  (or, sometimes, level pitch) in the first
  syllable of Accent 2. (Hadding-Koch 1961, p. 64)
• some stresses with Accent 2 coded as
  exhibiting rises may end in rather marked falls
  (ibid. p. 66)
• Among the 329 monosyllables in the corpus 165
  were falling ... , 115 rising , 15 level, and
  34 crescent-shaped It would seem reasonable
  to question whether monosyllables and disyllabic
  words with Accent 1 should, as is usually done,
  be classed together as having acute tonal
  accent ... (ibid. p. 66)

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• the movement of pitch is everywhere
  continuous, with an up-and-down alternation It
  appears that if one did not know (by auditory
  means) where the stresses are located, it would
  not be possible to detect the characteristic word
  tones. If we compare the tonal movement of two
  specific words from their corpus, we find that
  the first two syllables of each have almost
  identical appearance Yet we know that the
  first has accent 1 on the second syllable, while
  the second has accent 2 on the first Wherever
  we have an accent 1, its stress falls near the
  low point of the curve in accent 2, the stress
  comes earlier, and usually includes the preceding
  high point, while the low point follows the main
  stress. The melody is not in itself
  distinctive, but acquires distinctive value when
  it is associated with stress in a particular
  way. (Haugen Joos 1953 (1972) 425f).

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C
V
C
V
C
V
C
V
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• 
  Bruce 1977, fig. 26

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C
V
C
V
C
Arvaniti, Ladd Mennen, 1998
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Atterer Ladd 2004, Fig. 2
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Hes a m i n e r
Her fathers a m i n e r
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• Nino?
• Il Nino?
• È il Nino?
• È con il Nino?
• E là cè il Nino?
• E là cè con il Nino?
• E là stavano con il Nino?

Petrone Ladd, in preparation
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Petrone Ladd (in preparation)
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• Association
• is phonological and abstract
• is categorical and discrete
• Alignment
• is phonetic and concrete
• is continuously variable, and measurable

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• If you distinguish association from alignment,
  you can easily
• deal with cases where a prosodic cue belongs
  phonologically with one syllable but is
  manifested phonetically on another
• think about the relation between phonological
  categories and phonetic cues in ways familiar
  from segmental phonology
• make precise cross-language phonetic comparisons
  analogous to segmental comparisons

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English
Italian
/b/
/p/
/p/
/b/
prevoicing
aspiration
VOT
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• Eng. /bip/ It.
  /pip/
• (This notation tells us only that we are
  dealing with the early-VOT stop in English and
  the late-VOT stop in Italian.)
• Accent 1 HL Accent 2 HL
• (This notation tells us only that we are
  dealing with early alignment in Accent 1 and late
  alignment in Accent 2.)

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• Happy
• Birthday
• Gösta
• !!!!