Gradient perception of intonation

Phonologists usually reserve the term gradience for the distinction between phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is gradient and phonology is categorical. But in recent years, phonotactic patterns have been found to be gradient both along frequency counts and grammaticality judgments (see for instance Pierrehumbert 2003, Frisch & Stearns, this volume, and Jurafsky 2003). This chapter addresses the question of gradience in a different area of phonology, namely the tonal patterns of utterances. It concentrates on the graded acceptability of tonal patterns in contexts, and experimentally shows that acceptability judgments about tonal contours in declarative sentences are gradient in an interesting way. A sentence’s most ‘neutral’ tonal patterns (Höhle 1982) is the one expressed in an ‘all-new’ or ‘broad-focus’ context, the "Unmarked Prosodic Structure" (UPS) of the sentence. In German, it is also the pattern found in main clauses with a topicalized subject and a focused VP. Marked prosodic patterns, like those uttered in a narrow focus context, require a special information structure, and thus have a restricted context of use. As a result, tonal contours are not gradient as such, but only in association with texts and information structure. In the experiment reported in the paper, we study the pattern of acceptability of neutral and marked intonation patterns in context. Though the research reported in this chapter is limited to declarative sentences, we are confident that other kinds of tonal patterns are gradient in a similar way.