Intonation and Contrast  

Oleh:

Wunderlich, Dieter

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 8 no. 3 (Aug. 1991), page 239-251.
Topik: Intonation; Contrast; Syntactic Structure
Fulltext: vol 8, no 3, p 239-251.pdf (576.17KB)

Isi artikel

In this paper I will deal with one important aspect of the relationship of syntactic structure and intonarional structure. Syntactic structure is organized hierarchically and may involve some co-indexing between parts of it, whereas intonarional structure is organized linearly and from left to right. I shall argue that in matching these two different kinds of structure, one needs an interface level which I will call the level of contrast. The particular idea I propose is that on this level syntactic information is used to form a structure of so-called contrast phrases which is purely right-branching, and that it is this contrast structure on which pitch assignment rules apply in order to yield the lay-out of intonarional structure. Because in German syntax rightbranching dominates over left-branching, the constrast structure often preserves the properties of syntactic structure. But there are also clear cases with different structures at the two levels. The empirical background comes from some observations made in a former experimental project on German intonation (see Wunderlich 1988). In that project intonation contours were systematically varied by resynthesis on the basis of natural utterances, and these synthesized stimuli were then judged in perception tests. We are planning to study the predictions outlined in this paper in a similar experimental framework. For several reasons, however, these experiments have not yet been performed. Therefore, the study is still in a preliminary state. The most important observation concerns a particular type of intonation contour in German which may be called a 'bridge' (somewhat similar to the 'hat' in Dutch, which has been investigated by the Eindhoven group). It has been shown elsewhere that the bridge contour is composed of two successive pitch accents, the first one rising with a following high level, the second one falling. What has been puzzling are the conditions under which this bridge contour is realized. It can be produced under quite different circumstances. The idea put forth in this paper is that the two pitch accents which complement each other in the bridge signal a contrast between two focus domains on which the bearers of the accent can be projected.

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