Greek wh-questions and the phonology of intonation

The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. With acoustic data, we show (1) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (2) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment depending on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets. Models that specify the F0 of all syllables, or models that specify F0 by superposing contour shapes for shorter and longer domains, cannot account for such fine-grained lawful variation except by using ad-hoc tonal specifications, which, in turn, do not allow for phonological generalizations about contours applying to utterances of greatly different lengths. In contrast, our findings follow easily from an autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology, according to which melodies may contain long F0 stretches derived by interpolation between specified targets associated with metrically strong syllables and prosodic boundaries. ∗ The research reported here was supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council through grant no. R000-23-5614 to the University of Edinburgh, with Ladd and Arvaniti as Co-Principal Investigators and Ineke Mennen as Research Associate. Special thanks are due to Ineke Mennen for her invaluable assistance with the recording and measurement of the present data. We are most grateful to Mary Beckman for making her algorithmic determination of elbows program available to us, for her generous hospitality to the first author during the initial preparation of this manuscript and for her encouragement. Thanks are also due to our speakers for their cooperation, to the guest editors of this volume for their support, and to Pilar Prieto and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Finally we wish to thank Norman Dryden, Mike Bennett, Eddie Dubourg, Cedric Macmartin, and Stewart Smith for technical assistance.