Between fall and fall-rise: substance-function relations in German phrase-final intonation contours.
This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has not been established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end of the phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum between falling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR differ with respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal, and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps. First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the necessary background information on the phonetics of the contours. In the second step, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using the paradigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically generated stimuli on nine semantic scales, such as 'impolite/polite'. The hypotheses were generally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement, while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F in that it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impoliteness. The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the addition of a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F(0); the functional consequence is a reduction of communicated dominance.
Ambrazaitis
Gilbert
G
Institute of Phonetics and Digital Speech Processing (IPDS), University of Kiel, Germany. Gilbert.Ambrazaitis@ling.lu.se
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires