The dialects of Limburg and the adjacent Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian dialects have two tonal accents, Accent 1 and Accent 2. In the generative tradition it is taken for granted that these accents are to be represented tonally. In this article I want to take issue with this approach. I will show that there is an array of facts that cannot be explained with lexical tones. These facts rather ...

This paper presents the phonetic analysis of the intonational patterns conveying the pragmatic contents of continuation and/or marking syntactic relations in Rome and Perugia Italian: data show the type and the distribution of accents and boundaries occurring in spontaneous task-oriented dialogues. Results imply considerations about issues concerning systemic, phonotactic and realizational aspe...

We built and trained a model of intonation in continuous Mandarin speech based on the Stem-ML model of interacting accents. With this model, we found that we can accurately reproduce the intonation of the speaker using only one accent template for each lexical tone category. The resulting parameters are interpretable, and we find that the fitted model is consistent with linguistic expectations....

Correct accentuation and phrasing improves the quality of synthetic speech. This paper discusses an algorithm which assigns both sentence accents and phrase boundaries on the basis of the prosodic sentence structure. Although this latter structure is theoretically derived from the syntactic structure, the present algorithm deterrnines the prosodic structure by means of (linguistically and stati...

Cross-linguistic phoneme correspondences, or metaphonemes1, can be defined across languages which are relatively closely related in exactly the same way as correspondences can be defined for dialects, or accents, of a single language (e.g. O’Connor, 1973; Fitt, 2001). In this paper we present the theory of metaphonemes, comparing them with traditional archiand morphophonemes as well as with sim...

This paper discusses an experiment concerning the assignment of contrastive accents, i.e., accents used to indicate the presence of contrastive information. The experiment tested which of two existing approaches to the determination of contrastive information gives the most natural results. According to one approach the presence of ‘alternative items’ is the only condition for the assignment of...

This paper reports our project on “sound education” in second language teaching in Blackfoot. “Sound” in this context refers to word melody and pitch accent. As described in (Frantz, 2009), accents in some words impact meaning. For second language learners of Blackfoot, in addition to learning words with the correct pitch accents, it is also important to learn correct word melody. Sounding “rig...

In this paper we investigate a particular type of stress marking in Czech, in which the syllable perceived as prominent is not accompanied by any clearly audible change in the overall pitch course. The paper gives a perceptual, phonotactic and acoustic account of these “flat pitch accents”. No positional effects or semantic correlates of words bearing this type of accent were found. Flat accent...