Characteristics of pre-nuclear pitch accents in statements and yes-no questions in Greek
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0014/000014Abstract
In this paper I present the results of a production experiment testing the hypothesis that L*+H pre-nuclear pitch accents are indistinguishable in statements and ques-tions in Greek. Results show that the L and the H tones of the L*+H pitch accent have different patterns of alignment in polar and in statements. These results suggest that the pitch accents are realized differently in the two utterance types under inves-tigation. It remains to be explored, through perception experiments, whether the phonetic differences that were found are salient enough for listeners to distinguish between statements and questions. If they are, then the prenuclear pitch accents in statements and those in polar questions belong to different phonological categories.
References
Arvaniti, A. 2002. The intonation of yes-no questions in Greek. In M. MakriTsilipakou (ed.), Selected Papers on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 71-83. Thessaloniki: Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University.
Arvaniti, A., Ladd, R.D., and Mennen, I. 1998. Stability of Tonal Alignment: The Case of Greek Prenuclear Accents, Journal of Phonetics, 26: 3-25.
Arvaniti, A., and Baltazani, M. 2005. Intonational Analysis and Prosodic Annotation of Greek Spoken Corpora. In Jun, S.A (ed.), Prosodic Typology and Transcription. Oxford University Press.
Baltazani, M., 2002. Quantifier scope and the role of intonation in Greek. PhD Thesis, UCLA.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Mary Baltazani (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.
