Prosodic marking of information status in tokyo Japanese
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper reports the results of a study on the prosodic marking of information status, i.e., whether information is ‘new’ or ‘given’ in the discourse, in Tokyo Japanese noun phrases (NPs). Previous investigations have indicated that such discoursal information is reflected in accent distribution in Dutch NPs, and in degree of accentuation in Italian NPs. An acoustic analysis of Japanese data, in which accent is lexically determined, reveals that information status, both for accented and unaccented words, is mainly reflected in pitch range, with higher range used to signal new information, and lower range used to signal given information. In addition to the effect of discourse, there is ‘downstep’, which lowers the pitch of words following an accented word inside a prosodic phrase. A perception study shows that this pitch range variation has limited cue value for listeners about the information status of particular words.
منابع مشابه
The Focus-Independent Effect of Tonal Proximity on the Realization of Lexical Pitch Accent in Tokyo Japanese and Bermeo Basque
Tokyo Japanese (TJ) and the Northern Bizkaian dialects of Basque (NBB) are known to have similar pitch accent systems, and in both languages the focus status of words affects the prosodic phrasing. A cross-linguistic experiment was conducted to investigate whether the effect of tonal proximity on the phonetic realization of lexical pitch accent is conditioned by focus-related prosodic phrasing ...
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