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Introduction to Prosody
Theories and Models
Dr Robert Mannell
What is prosody? (1)
Prosody is the study of the tune and rhythm
of speech and how these features contribute
.
2
What is prosody? (2)
Prosody is the study of those aspects of
speech that typically apply to a level above that
sequences of words (in prosodic phrases).
Features above the level of the phoneme (orsegment) are referred to as suprasegmentals.
A phonetic study of prosody is a study of the
suprasegmental features of speech.
3
What is prosody? (3)
At the phonetic level, prosody is characterised
by:-
vocal pitch (fundamental frequency)
loudness (acoustic intensity)
rhythm (phoneme and syllable duration)
Phonetic studies of prosody often concentrate
on measuring these characteristics.
4
What is prosody? (4)
Prosody has been studied from numerous
perspectives by people belonging to differing
.
There has been great diversity of approaches to
prosody.
Different approaches examine prosody from the
perspective of grammar, of discourse, of
pragmatics and of phonetics and phonology
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What is prosody? (5)
Prosody can be regarded as part of the
grammar of a language.
Discourse approaches examine the prosody
of normal interactions rather than stylised,
constructed, fluent, scripted interactions.
Functionalist approaches integrate the study
of prosody with the study of grammar and
meaning in natural social interactions.
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What is prosody? (6)
Pragmatics examines the distinction between
the literal meaning of a sentence and the
.
can have the effect of changing the meaning
of a sentence by indicating a speaker's
attitude to what is being said (eg. it can
indicate irony, sarcasm, etc.) particularly
when prosody works in conjunction with the
social/situational context of an utterance.
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What is prosody? (7)
Prosody overlaps with emotion in speech.
The same acoustic features that are used to
, ,
rhythm, rate of utterance) are also affected
by emotion in the voice. For example, I can
simultaneously be sad and ironic or fearful
and sarcastic.
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What is prosody? (8)
Speech contains various levels of informationthat can be described as:-
Paralinguistic may indicate attitude or
membership of a speech community Non-linguistic may indicate something
about a speakers vocal physiology, state ofhealth or emotional state
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What is prosody? (9)
Paralinguistic aspects of speech are those
aspects that are not strictly linguistic, but
utterance.
Paralinguistic features may help to indicate aspeakers attitude, although this may overlap
with emotional aspects of speech.
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What is prosody? (10)
Another paralinguistic aspect of speech are
those features that indicate a speakers
.
are effectively sociolinguistic markers of
speaker identity. eg. Australian versus New
Zealand pronunciations, styles of speech of
farmers versus bankers, etc.
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What is prosody? (11)
Some speech communities might prefer
broader pronunciations
Some speech communities might prefer
more nasal voices.
Some speech communities might speak
louder or faster.
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What is prosody? (12)
Gender has both paralinguistic and non-
linguistic aspects. Some features may be
particular speech community (eg. degree of
pharyngealisation in Arabic)
But, features that are purely a consequence
of physiological differences are non-linguistic
aspects of speech
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What is prosody? (13)
A speakers emotional state is often evident
in the speakers voice. These features are
to the meaning of the current utterance.
On the other hand, our current emotional
state might be a non-linguistic undertone to
what is being said (ie. if its not very relevant
to whats being said)
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What is prosody? (14)
Our state of health can be evident in our
speech. This would be a non-linguistic
.
Note, however, that even this distinction can
blur when the health issue is cognitive andaffects the expression of meaning.
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What is prosody? (15)
Segmental and suprasegmental features of
speech are both affected by linguistic,
- .
The main acoustic correlates of prosody
(rhythm, intensity and fundamental frequency)are also correlates of paralinguistic and non-
linguistic phenomena, particularly emotion.
16
Schools of Prosody
There have been many theoretical approaches
to prosody. The earliest such schools dealt
(eg. the ancient Greeks).
Often the British and American approaches to
prosody are contrasted, but this dichotomy is a
simplification of the diversity of theoretical and
experimental perspectives.
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British Schools (1)
Crombie (1987) listed the following three British
approaches to intonation:-
syntactic approach
affective or attitudinal approach
discoursal approach
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British Schools (2)
Crombie (1987) states that the British schoolshave the following elements in common:-
"or tone units (tonality)"
"locating the syllables on which majormovements of pitch occur (tonicity)"
"identifying the direction of pitch movements(tone)"
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British Schools (3)
British schools tend to focus on pitch contours
or tunes whilst American schools tend to
.
Different tunes are associated with different
meanings.
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British Schools (4)
Central to British models of prosody is the
idea of the tone group
A tone group is a sequence of speech
dominated by prominent or accented word.
The accented word is the focal point for thetonal characteristics of the tone group. It
contains the strongest, most prominent
syllable (usually its primary stressed syllable).
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British Schools (5)
The accented syllable, or rather the strongestsyllable in the accented word, is often referred
.
A tone group can contain one or morerhythmic feet.
Each foot is dominated by a stressed syllable.In English a foot starts with a stressed syllableand ends with the last unstressed syllablebefore the next stress.
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British Schools (6)
As an example of a British school we will
examine the approach of Michael Halliday
- .
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Halliday (1)
It is not enough to treat intonation systems asif they merely carried a set of emotionalnuances En lish intonation contrasts aregrammatical (Halliday, 1967:10)
In contrast, Pike (1945:21), a founder of theAmerican school said that intonation ismerely a shade of meaning superimposedupon intrinsic lexical meaning according tothe attitude of the speaker.
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Halliday (2)
A consequence of Hallidays view of
intonation was that being a part of grammar it
grammatical systems.
Halliday utilises the British concept of tunes
which extend across a section of text.
These tunes have a nucleus which is the
first (salient) syllable in the tonic foot.
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Halliday (3)
Tonality, according to Halliday, is related to the
number of tone groups in an utterance and
a speech act.
Tone is a complex pattern built out of a
simple opposition between certain and
uncertain polarity. (Halliday, 1967:30)
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Halliday (4)
Halliday describes 5 simple and 2 compound
primary tones for English. They are:-lli one alling
Tone 2 high rising
Tone 3 low rising
Tone 4 falling-rising
Tone 5 rising-falling
Tone 13 falling plus low rising
Tone 53 rising-falling plus low rising
27
Halliday (5)
If polarity is certain, the pitch of the tonic falls;
if uncertain, it rises. (Halliday, 1967:30)
Polarity refers to the truth of a statement (true
or false in fact or in belief) or to whether
something is known versus unknown. From these tones and the idea of polarity,
Halliday builds up a complex pattern of
relationships between tone and meaning.
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Halliday (6)
Tone 1: falling tone polarity known the unmarkedrealisation of a statement (also a question with known polarity)
Tone 2: rising tone polarity unknown the unmarkedli i i li i - i
Tone 3: low rising not yet decided whether know orunknown dependent on something else
Tone 4: falling-rising seems certain, but turns out not to be.It is associated with reservations and conditions
Tone 5: rising-falling seems uncertain, but turns out to becertain. It is used on strong, especially contradicting assertions It often carries an implication of you ought to know that
(the above is from Halliday, 1985, 281-282)
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Halliday (7)
Some examples:-
Tone 1 (falling) Thats a dog. statement
one a ng s o a og ques onwith known polarity
Tone 2 (rising) Are you coming? I dontknow if you are coming but want to know.
cf. Tone 1 (falling) Are you coming? this isa bit more like a command.
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Halliday (8)
Tone 3 (low-rising) I think Ill come
tomorrow. but not really sure.
Tone 4 (falling-rising) Bill is coming if hes
allowed. conditional statement.
Tone 5 (rising-falling) You ought to know
that.
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Tone in Intonation and Lexical Tone (1)
The use of the word tone in some theories ofintonation and prosody needs to be clarified.
tone in tone languages, where changing thepitch contour of a word changes its meaning .
For example, changing the tone on ma inMandarin Chinese may change the meaningfrom horse to mother.
That is, changing the tone means that youhave selected a different word.
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Tone in Intonation and Lexical Tone (2)
Lexical tone in tone languages is usuallyattached to a single syllable.
entity such as a tone group (a phrase orsentence characterised by a particularprosodic pattern). Occasionally a tone groupmight only consist of a single word, whichmight in turn be a single syllable, but veryoften it consists of more than one word.
33
American Schools (1)
American schools of prosody are often
described as relying on a phonemic or levels
.
For example, Bloomfield (1933) referred to
"differences of pitch ... as secondaryphonemes". (but note that Bloomfield, like
the British, used pitch contours rather than
pitch levels).
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American Schools (2)
Pike (1945) used:-
pitch heights to characterise intonation
contours (contours are sequences of pitch
height)
a systematic approach to speaker attitude
the interdependence of intonation, stress,
quantity, tempo, rhythm and voice quality(the above summary is after Chun(2002))
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American Schools (3)
Pike (1945) utilised four levels of pitch
because four levels are enough to provide
contours which have differences of meaning
so far discovered.
These four levels may, for convenience, be
labeled extra-high, high, mid and low
respectively (Pike, 1945)
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American Schools (4)
The ToBI framework for transcribing prosody
(eg. Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988),
.
transcription system based on two relative
levels (low and high).
ToBI is particularly suited to phonetic analyses
of prosody but increasingly it is used in studies
of prosody and meaning.
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ToBI framework
The remainder of this topic will concentrate
on the ToBI framework of Pierrehumbert,
.
ToBI is dealt with on the following web site:-
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonology/intonation/tobi_introduction.html
Next weeks lecture will be on ToBI.
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References (1)
These texts were referred to above, but are not required reading.
Beckman, M. E., Hirschberg, J., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S.
(2005). "The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI
framework". In S.-A. Jun, ed., Prosodic Typology: The
Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing, pp. 9-54. Oxford
University Press.
Chun, D.M. (2002) Discourse Intonation in L2: From theory andresearch to practice, University of California, Santa Barbara
Crombie, W. (1987) "Intonation in English: A systematic
perspective".
Halliday, M.A.K. (1967) Intonation and grammar in British
English, The Hague: Mouton.
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References (2)
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985)An introduction to Functional Grammar,London: Edward Arnold.
Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Beckman, M. E. (1988). Japanese Tone
Structure (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series No. 15). MIT
Press.
Pike, K.L. (1945) The intonation of American English, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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