Abstract
Most research on tune meaning has focussed on the contribution of the nuclear configuration (composed of nuclear accent, phrase accent and boundary tone), while the meaning contribution of the prenuclear contour (i.e., the intonational region preceding the nuclear accent) is still understudied. In Neapolitan Italian, differences in early (L+H*) vs. late (L*+H) nuclear accent alignment are used to differentiate narrow focus statements and yes/no questions. Furthermore, a tone appears to be inserted at the right edge of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in the prenuclear contour, which is differently specified in questions (HAP) and in statements (LAP). In this paper, we test the hypothesis that such a difference in AP tonal specification would help Neapolitan listeners to recover the contrast between questions and statements early within the intonation phrase. Both an identification and a semantic differential task were run on gated stimuli, in which the nuclear accent information was omitted. Results show that the prenuclear contour carries enough information in order to distinguish the two intonation modalities and that AP scaling manipulation significantly affects listeners’ judgments. This challenges the idea that the nuclear configuration alone is relevant for the questions-statements distinction, thus implying that tune meaning is the result of the interaction between prenuclear and nuclear f 0 contours.
Keywords
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- 1.
Note that, in such compositional view, the relationship between tunes and speech acts (like ‘assertion’ or ‘question’) is not one-to-one, so that the same tune can be associated to different speech acts, and vice versa. For example, the H* L- L% pattern might occasionally be employed with wh- questions in American English.
- 2.
Another possible hypothesis is that the tone following the prenuclear peak is part of the prenuclear accent. This would lead us to reanalyse the prenuclear accent as tritonal, with a different phonological specification for statements (LH*L) and questions (LH*H or even LH*!H). Apart from theory-internal type of arguments against such a proposal (see Grice 1995), preliminary studies have also found that, in Neapolitan, this tone is consistently aligned around the end of the prosodic word, independently of the prenuclear rise temporal location (Petrone 2008), thus suggesting that we are dealing with an edge tone. Moreover, D’Imperio and Petrone (2008) and Petrone (2008) found that this tone is not accompanied by the percept of an intermediate phrase break nor by a degree of final lengthening comparable to that at the end of an intermediate phrase, thus suggesting that it would mark the right boundary of a smaller prosodic constituent, i.e., the AP.
- 3.
We label the prenuclear rise as (LH*) to distinguish it from the nuclear L+H* accent of narrow focus statements. Specifically, while the peak in the L+H* accent seems to have a secondary association with the first mora in the accented syllable, the peak in the (LH*) does not have any secondary association with segmental anchors in the metrical structure (Prieto et al. 2005).
- 4.
- 5.
In statistics, it is still unclear how to calculate the number of degrees of freedom in regression models including random factors. In mixed models, a valid alternative to “standard” p-values is to calculate the p-value from a MONTE CARLO sampling by Markov chain (pMCMC = Monte Carlo Markov Chain; see Baayen 2008). Such values, automatically calculated by the lme4 R package, are reported here to evaluate the statistical significance of the fixed factors in our models.
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Acknowledgments
This article developed material presented at the Conference TIE3 and we are very grateful to the audience of the conference. Thanks also to Sue Hertz and Lisa Selkirk for fruitful discussions and to reviewers for comments to an earlier version of the paper. Thanks also to Dr. Cinzia Citraro for technical help. All errors are of course ours.
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Petrone, C., D’Imperio, M. (2011). From Tones to Tunes: Effects of the f 0 Prenuclear Region in the Perception of Neapolitan Statements and Questions. In: Frota, S., Elordieta, G., Prieto, P. (eds) Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0137-3_9
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