Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityDiscussionIn general terms, the results presented hereshow considerable similarities in the basic intonationpatterns of the utterance-final accent inthe two dialects. There is a pronounced finalrise-fall excursion which marks the end of theutterance. The presence of lexical tone in thetonal dialect does, however, restrict the intonationin certain specific ways. The most apparentoverall difference is found in the restrictedrange of the tonal dialect. This is an interesting,but perhaps not such an unexpected difference.As the tonal differences have lexical meaningfor the speakers of the tonal dialect, it may beimportant for speakers to maintain control overthe absolute pitch of the syllable which can resultin the general reduction of pitch range.The lexical tones and the reduction of pitchrange seem to have implications for the realizationof focal accent. In the non-tonal dialect,the final color adjectives of sentences 2 and 4showed a much higher F0 maximum than didthe final nouns of sentences 1 and 3. Here thespeakers are free to use rather dramatic F0 excursionsto mark focus. The tonal speakers, onthe other hand, seem to be restricted from doingthis. It is only the final color adjective of sentence4 which is given a markedly higher F0maximum than the counterpart noun in sentence3. Since the adjective of sentence 4 hashigh lexical tone, this fact seems to allow thespeakers to additionally raise the maximum F0.As the adjective of sentence 2 has low lexicaltone, the speakers are not free to raise this F0maximum. Here we see evidence of interplaybetween lexical tone and intonation.In the listing of animals in sentences 5 and6, there is a large difference in the F0 maximumof the final word in the non-tonal dialect.The word “badger” in sentence 6 is spoken witha much higher F0 maximum than the word“chicken” in sentence 5. This can be explainedby the fact that the word “badger” is semanticallymarked compared to the other commonfarm animals in the list. It is quite natural inKammu farming culture to have a buffalo, apig, a chicken, a horse and a cat, but not abadger! Some of the speakers even asked toconfirm what the word was, and therefore it isnot surprising if the word often elicited additionalspeaker engagement. This extra engagementalso shows up in the tonal speakers’ versionsof “badger” raising the low lexical tone toa higher F0 maximum than the word “chicken”in sentence 5 which has high lexical tone. Here,speaker engagement is seen to override the to-81nal restriction, although the overall pitch rangeis still restricted compared to the non-tonal dia-betweenlect. Thus we see an interactionspeaker engagement, tone and intonation.ConclusionsIn this study we see that the general patterns ofintonation for these sentences are similar in thetwo dialects. However, there is clear evidenceof the lexical tones of the tonal dialect restrictingthe pitch range and the realization of focus,especially when the lexical tone is low. Speakerengagement can have a strong effect on the ut-accent, and can even neutralizeterance-finalpitch differences of high and low lexical tone incertain cases.AcknowledgementsThe work reported in this paper has been car-from tone” (SIFT), supported by theried out within the research project, “SeparatingintonationBank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation withadditional funding from Crafoordska stiftelsen.ReferencesFant, G. and Kruckenberg, A. (2004) Analysisand synthesis of Swedish prosody with outlookson production and perception. In FantG., Fujisaki H., Cao J. and Xu Y (eds.)From traditional phonology to modernspeech processing, 73-95. Foreign LanguageTeaching and Research Press, Beijing.Karlsson A., House D., Svantesson J-O. andTayanin D. (2007) Prosodic phrasing in tonaland ton-tonal dialects of Kammu. Proceedingsof the 16th International Congressof Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrücken, Germany,1309-1312.Karlsson A., House D. and Tayanin, D. (2008)Recognizing phrase and utterance as prosodicunits in non-tonal dialects of Kammu.In Proceedings, FONETIK 2008, 89-92,Department of Linguistics, University ofGothenburg.Sjölander K. and Beskow J. (2000) WaveSurfer- an open source speech tool. In Proceedingsof ICSLP 2000, 6th Intl Conf on SpokenLanguage Processing, 464-467, Beijing.Svantesson J-O. and House D. (2006) Toneproduction, tone perception and Kammutonogenesis. Phonology 23, 309-333.