Tonal structure and constituency in Neapolitan Italian: Evidence for the Accentual Phrase in statements and questions
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this paper, we report on some acoustic data suggesting the existence of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Neapolitan Italian. In late narrow focus utterances in which intonation modality was varied, there was a difference in the shape and slope of the interaccentual region linking the H target of the prenuclear rise with the L target of the following nuclear rise. We hypothesized that such difference is due to the presence of a tone marking the end of an Accentual Phrase (AP), whose domain roughly correspond to the phonological phrase (φ). It is tentatively proposed that the phrasal tone is L for statements and HL for questions.
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