Prosodic And Phonology

PROSODIC PHONOLOGY
Dr H. Ortiz Lira UNIVERSIDAD METROPOLITANA DE CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACION UNIVERSIDAD DE SANTIAGO DE CHILE 2008

1. Speech can be looked at from three perspectives: that of the person who produces it (i.e. the speaker), that of the person who perceives it (i.e. the listener), and that which sees it as an acoustic signal (i.e. the sound waves travelling from speaker to hearer).For methodological purposes it is crucial not to confuse these categories. 2. Table 1 summarizes the phonetic properties (dimensions, parameters, attributes) of articulated sound as this is produced by the speaker, transmitted by him/her as an acoustic signal and finally perceived by the hearer. Pitch, loudness and quantity –the three primary, auditory correlates of prosody– interact in variousways to produce prominence, i.e. to make some syllables –and therefore words– stand out with respect to other syllables in an utterance. This means that we can distinguish between salient and non-salient words depending on the auditory impression these cause on our ears. Thus, a syllable may be perceived as more prominent than others because it has started some kind of pitch movement and/or becausethe speaker has put in more physical effort on it (and therefore it sounds louder) and/or because it lasts longer: TABLE 1: PHONETIC SOUND PROPERTIES AND THE DIMENSIONS OF PROSODY speaker physiological (productive) vocal fold vibration breath force & muscular effort timing of articulatory movements resonator shapes physical (acoustic) fundamental frequency (F0) intensity (amplitude) durationformant structure hearer psychophysical (auditory) pitch loudness quantity

dimensions of prosody

quality

Prosodic phonology. H. Ortiz Lira. 2008. Page 1

3. Prominence is not to be confused with two other notions which are used in the literature to express salience –stress and accent. Prominence –the capacity a syllable or word has to stand out– is a phonetic notion. The fact that a hearercan perceive a syllable more or less salient than another hearer makes this auditory sensation subjective. Stress and accent, on the other hand, have phonological status. Stress is a feature of the word, i.e. a lexical notion. Words are said to be recorded in our mental lexicon as patterns of phonemes and patterns of stresses and this makes stress an abstract notion. Accent, on the other hand, isa feature of the utterance, i.e. a contextual, concrete notion. Whereas all words have at least one stress in the lexicon, not all words bear an accent in an utterance; when they do, the accent goes on a lexically stressed syllable. Stress, therefore, is a potential for accent, and accent is the realization of stress. In the case of English and Spanish, two degrees of stress can be accounted for–primary and secondary. Both can be realized as accents, but it is the former which are more likely to be reflected as accents in unmarked contexts (e.g. not in slow, deliberate, contrastive or emphatic speech). Finally, accents involve association with some type of pitch; this is why they are also known as pitch accents –the backbone of intonation. Foreign learners often find it difficult todifferentiate between (phonologically) accented and (phonetically) prominent words. One of the prosodic contexts where this is particularly problematic concerns words containing strong, long vowels occurring at the end of a rising intonation pattern, e.g. for /fç˘/ in:
What are you for ing wait

A native listener of English would not hesitate to perceive the last (nuclear) accent on the lowestsyllable in the utterance (wait-), this being a default wh-question ending in a verb + preposition; the stranded, high-pitched strong-form /fç˘/, though, will often mislead the foreign learner to perceive it as accented. Whereas native speakers apply phonological rules to decide on accentual matters, learners simply rely on phonetic evidence. An accented syllable is conveniently defined as one which...