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Tonal Elements and Their Alignment

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Prosody: Theory and Experiment

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 14))

Abstract

In English, many different melodies are possible on any given word or phrase. Even a monosyllabic word, such as Anne can be produced with many qualitatively different melodic patterns, as illustrated in Figure 1. This situation provides a contrast with languages such as Mandarin, in which the tonal pattern is an intrinsic part of the lexical representation. In English, the choice of the melody is not entailed by the choice of words, but rather functions independently to convey pragmatic information. Specifically, it conveys information about how the utterance is related to the discourse and to the mutual beliefs which interlocutors build up during the course of the discourse, as discussed in Ward and Hirschberg (1985) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Janet Pierrehumbert

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  1. Janet Pierrehumbert
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lund, Sweden

    Merle Horne

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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Pierrehumbert, J. (2000). Tonal Elements and Their Alignment. In: Horne, M. (eds) Prosody: Theory and Experiment. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9413-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9413-4_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5562-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9413-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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