جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه « Tonal structure » در نشریات گروه « ادبیات و زبان ها »

The present paper aims at comparing the intonation of Persian statements and questions in terms of the pitch scaling of tonal events in Pre-nuclear and nuclear prosodic positions as well as utterance final position. Previous research suggest that the direction of the sentence-final fundamental frequency (F0) movement is the most salient intonational cue to questions and statements in Persian. Prototypical yes/no questions are often characterized by a high F0 rise (H%) whereas statements have a terminal F0 fall (L%). It has also been suggested that the H tone of the nuclear pitch accent as well as the pitch range is higher in questions than statements. The present study explored the question as to what extent the pre-nuclear, nuclear and boundary tones may contribute to tune meaning in Persian, thereby distinguishing between statements and questions. The research methodology was the one used in laboratory phonology. The results showed that the tonal structure of the F0 contour between the nuclear pitch accent and the end of the utterance is different in the two sentence type: statements are characterized by L-L% while questions are characterized by L-H%. The results further suggested that the differences between statement and question intonation are not limited to boundary tones as the pitch scaling of both the L and the H tones of pre-nuclear and nuclear pitch accents are also different in the two sentence types.

In studies on the realization of information structure in West Germanic languages (notably English, German and Dutch), it is commonly assumed that new information is marked by a pitch accent, while given information is deaccented (i.e. there is no pitch accent where one would otherwise be expected, see Cruttenden, 2006). However, a number of investigations of the prosodic marking of given and new information have gone beyond this dichotomy, taking into account different types of accentuation. One such study is Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg’s (1990) chapter on the interpretation of intonational contours in American English. They claim that both given and new information can be accented, and that it is the type of pitch accent which is used to differentiate between them (low: given; high: new). Two others within the British School (and on British English) are Halliday (1967a) and Brazil et al. (1980). Both, like Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, allow for given information to be accented. Halliday (1967: 28) claims that contour type and accompanying local pitch range distinguish between given and new (mid-low to low: given; mid to low: new; and additionally high to low: contrastive new). Brazil et al. (1980:13) also claim that the nuclear contour distinguishes given from new but list different tones (falling- rising: given; falling: new). Furthermore, much of the work done on prosodic marking of information structure has concentrated on the binary distinction between given and new information, rather than different degrees of givenness. One exception is Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) who claim that a particular type of pitch accent can indicate whether information should be inferable, i.e. neither completely givennor completely new. However, most studies which refer to degrees of givenness are predominantly concerned with the morphosyntactic form of referring expressions. Only few combine morphosyntax and intonation, notably Allerton (1978) who nonetheless concentrates on accent placement rather than accent or contour type. The present research addressed the phonetic realization of degrees of givenness in Persian intonational grammar. The study particularly explored the question as to whether the F0 contour of a referring expression correlates with the degree of accessibility it is associated with in a discourse context. It was hypothesized that the F0 excursion size of a pitch accent correlates with the degree of givenness of the respective referring expression such that the more given a referring expression is, the less the F0 excursion size will be. The research methodology was the one used in laboratory phonology. A corpus of 10 small texts was designed to test the hypothesis. The speakers (12 male and 12 female) read the texts on a computer screen. They were instructed to read each text naturally, with no special emphasis on any part of the sentence. The target texts were recorded on DAT recorder using a high quality unidirectional head-mounted microphone (Shure SM58) in a sound proof booth. All the measurements were made on simultaneous visual displays of waveform, wideband spectrogram and f0 tracks. The results suggested that there is a negative correlation between the degree of accessibility of an expression and the pitch range or F0 scaling of its pitch accent; thus, the less accessible a referring expression is in a discourse context, the more compressed the pitch range of its pitch accent. The results further suggested that the pitch register of a referring expression significantly decreases as the expression becomes less accessible since degrees of givenness in the discourse context affects not only the F0 scaling the H tone but also the scaling the F0 valley. However, the tonal structure of a pitch accent is not affected by degrees of accessibility.

There are two competing views with respect to the tonal structure of Persian pitch accents. According to the first view, peak delay in Persian intonational grammar serves no phonological or contrastive function. This view assumes that the earlier or later peak alignment in Persian does not lead to contrasts in intonational meanings. As such, pitch accents in Persian are phonologically characterized as either L+H* or L*+H. According to the second view, it is assumed that both L+H* and L*+H exist in Persian intonational phonology, but they act at different layers of Persian prosodic structure: L+H* operates at the level of phonological word, while L*+H functions at the level of enclitic group. The present study addressed the phonetic behavior of Persian pitch accents in different prosodic contexts. The phonetic evidence found in this research shows that the tonal structure of Persian includes only one pitch accent, namely L*+H, whose peak (H tone) is realized with magnitude degrees of late alignment from no delay to long delay according to peak alignment continuum.

The present research is a corpus- based study on Persian intonation. Previous studies on Persian intonation have only focused on experimental data and to date few researches have been carried out on Persian intonational patterns as realized in natural spoken corpora. The aim of the present research is to evaluate the intonation patterns of Persian content and grammatical words in a natural spoken corpus. The content words included nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and the grammatical words included pronouns, prepositions and copular verbs. Earlier researches posit two types of pitch accent in Persian intonatioanl grammar: A bitonal pitch accent, namely L+H* that marks words with stress on a non-initial syllable, together with their enclitics, and a mono-tonal pitch accent, i.e., H* that describes mono-syllabic words or initial-stressed words. The question addressed in the present contribution is to what extent the intonational patterns assumed in the Persian intonation literature may be replicated in studies of Persian natural spoken corpora.    This research is based on the Auto-segmental theory of intonation. The intonational structure under this theory is composed of a number of tonal events aligned with specific segmental landmarks. The most important tonal events are pitch accents and boundary tones. Pitch accents are associated with stressed syllables while boundary tones are aligned with the boundary of prosodic units. These tonal events are called tonal targets as they are linked with specific segmental landmarks in the speech signal. The auto-segmental theory of intonation posits six pitch accents namely H*، L*،L+H*، L*+H، H+L*، H*+L.Among these pitch accents, L* and H* are mono-tonal, while L+H*، L*+H، H+L*، H*+L are bitonal. A mono-tonal accent is one which is composed of either a single high (H*) or low (L*) tone. Bitonal accents, on the other hand, are compound tones made of a combination of a low and a high tone, irrespective of their order.   The Methodology of the research is descriptive. A number of Persian content words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and grammatical words including pronouns, prepositions and copular verbs, were randomly selected from 104 utterances from FarsDat (Farsi spoken language database). All the utterances had been spoken by native speakers of Persian speaking the standard dialect of Tehrani Farsi. The target words, content and grammatical, were segmented from the acoustic signals of the utterances for further analysis. All acoustic parameters were measured using Praat software, version 5.2.12.
Measurements were made simultaneously on F0 contour and spectrograph. The F0 patterns of the target words were investigated to see whether they bear a pitch accent, and if they do, what kind of pitch accent they are most associated with.  The results suggested that while content words usually receive pitch accents, grammatical words are rarely produced with a pitch accent. The findings further suggested that the morpho-syntactic category of a given word is unable to affect its tonal pattern. The distribution of the pitch accent types H* and L*+H revealed that Persian words are most often produced with the L*+H accent type, irrespective of their lexical stress pattern, and that the H* is used in initial-stressed words only when the segmental condition for the realization of the L tone is not satisfied. It was also argued that the alignment of the H tone in L*+H accent is affected by the presence or absence of enclitics in a word: In words with an affixed enclitic, the H peak is delayed, and realized in the post-accented syllable, while in words with no enclitic pronoun, the peak is realized on the accented syllable with no delay. Overall, the findings of the present research indicated that all Persian words, irrespective of their stress pattern receive the bitonal pitch accent L*+H, and the pitch accent H*is realized on words with initial stress only when the phonological condition for the realization of the L tone is not met.

This article addresses the phonetic and phonological representation of H- phrase accent in the tonal structure of Persian pre-nuclear accents. In an experimental study, three groups of pre-nuclear accentual phrases, namely, phrases with antepenultimate, penultimate and final stress pattern, were selected for tonal examination. Materials were designed so as to yield under-pressure and pressure free prosodic environments. The sentences were then read by four speakers of standard Persian. Results revealed some evidence for the presence of phrase accent as a part of the tonal structure of all groups, except for oxytones in which there is not sufficient segmental space for the realization of the H- phrase tone. Thus, we may transcribe pre-nuclear accents in Persia as a sequence of an L+H* pitch accent and a H- phrase accent: L+H*H, whereby L+H* is associated with the stressed syllable and the H- is spread as a plateau from the accented syllable to the end of the accentual phrase. The observations further revealed that the H- plateau is realized in different ways depending on the stress pattern of the accentual phrase. The H- plateau can best be explained using the tone copy analysis which assumes that a plateau results from copying a phrase accent from the boundary to units which do not bear tones such as final syllables.