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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


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.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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

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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.

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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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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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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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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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