Uwe Reichel & Katalin Mády (University of Munich – MTA NYTI)

Character contours, accent groups, and prosodic phrasing

2014. június 3., 11.00

In Hungarian, prosodic words and high-level prosodic units such as the intonational phrase (IP) are prominent phrase-initially, i.e. their prosody is left-headed. In the present talk we discuss whether accents on the sentence level initiate a prosodic phrase on their own, as has been claimed by Hunyadi (2002) for metrical units and by Varga (1994, 2002) for character contours. Phrases that begin or end with an accent are also called accentual phrases (Jun 2005).

We presents results from two sets of experiments based on spontaneous utterances:

(1) In accentual phrase languages, accent groups (AG) tend to show a rising, falling, or rising-falling pattern that cannot be predicted by the overall declination of an intonational phrase (IP). We investigated whether AG f0 slopes deviate from the f0 slopes of the IP, and whether the deviation shows a uniform pattern. Results are compared to Slovak, another language with word-initial lexical stress.

(2) In order to infer a character contour representation of the accent groups, we proposed a linear parametrisation, which was further used to train classifiers for automatic character contour labeling.