Focus prominence and tonal alignment in Athenian and Cypriot Greek
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2010/03/0046/000166Keywords:
focus, intonation, Athenian Greek, Cypriot GreekAbstract
This study examines the effects of focus prominence production on tonal alignment in Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek. Information focus has been elicited by using a Wh-Question in utterances with varying number of syllable constituents —from twelve syllables to eighteen— following the constituent under focus prominence. The results indicate significant effects of speech variety on the alignment of tonal targets; utterance length on the other hand showed poor effects on tonal alignment.
References
Baltazani, M., & Jun, S.-A. 1999. Topic and focus intonation in Greek. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 1999), Vol. 2, 1305-1308. San Francisco, CA.
Botinis, A., Bannert, R., & Tatham, M. 2000. Contrastive tonal analysis of focus perception in Greek and Swedish. In: Botinis, A. (ed.), Intonation: Analysis, Modelling and Technology, 97-118. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Bruce, G. 1977. Swedish word accents in sentence perspective. Lund: Gleerup.
Peterson, G.E., & Lehiste, I. 1960. Duration of syllable nuclei in English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 32(6), 693-703.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2010 Charalambos Themistocleous (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.