42
votes
Aren't all spoken languages tonal?
Most languages called tonal are more precisely described as having lexical tone. This means that tone conveys a meaningful distinction between different lexical items. E.g. in Mandarin, 妈 mā with a ...
- 6,114
38
votes
Accepted
Why is there (almost) no variety to the Hebrew accent in Israel?
English has been spoken in New York for hundreds of years while Hebrew was only revitalized in the late 19th century. The British Isles are said to have more varieties of English than the rest of the ...
- 4,805
29
votes
Why is there (almost) no variety to the Hebrew accent in Israel?
You’re right that there is very little regional variation in Modern Hebrew accents (though there are a few street market and schoolyard slang differences). Israel is a small, well-connected country ...
- 1,152
17
votes
How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?
Yes, your assumption on a correlation between pitch variance and vocabulary size is wrong. The use of pitch you speak of is called "prosody" in linguistics; different speaking groups in society may ...
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16
votes
Why does IPA have stress in /ɡəˈʃtɔlt/ before instead of after the /ʃ/?
IPA doesn't make that decision. However, conventionally, stress is marked at the beginning of the syllable. The implication of transcribing the word as [gəˈʃtɔlt] is that the onset of the stressed ...
- 77.2k
15
votes
Accepted
How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?
Lexical tones and prosody peacefully co-exist in these languages. The speakers intuitively use only those pitch contours that do not overlap with the lexical tones.
Even more, sometimes an exaggerated ...
- 8,605
13
votes
Why is there (almost) no variety to the Hebrew accent in Israel?
Also note that most of the growth of Israely Hebrew follows the invention of the radio and telephone. Radio and television are believed to be major harminizors of accents.
- 231
13
votes
Aren't all spoken languages tonal?
It has been a long-standing challenge to define the difference between tone and intonation, since both exploit fundamental frequency as a physical exponent. The difference is generally drawn by ...
- 77.2k
7
votes
Why does IPA have stress in /ɡəˈʃtɔlt/ before instead of after the /ʃ/?
user6726's answer explains nicely what it means to have the stress marker in that position (it shows where the syllables are divided). But if your question was less "what does this notation mean" and ...
- 60.3k
6
votes
Accepted
looking for corpus of dialogue recording in appointment between doctors and patients
Contrary to the expectations of some commentators, doctor-patient corpora are available (under some conditions, needing to sign some licence and confidentially agreement) for research. The standard ...
- 29.2k
5
votes
Accepted
What's the explanatory value of Metrical Trees?
The primary problem that metrical trees are intended to solve is the representational problem of what the rule system actually produces. Prior to L&P 77 and as exemplified by the SPE analysis of ...
- 77.2k
5
votes
Accepted
How are Tone and Intonation languages different acoustically?
There is no dichotomy between tone languages and intonation languages. The available evidence indicates that all languages have intonational systems. Some languages have lexical stress, some have ...
- 77.2k
5
votes
Accepted
What’s a good example a language phenomena in which f0 is NOT correlated to pitch?
The linguistic proxy for pitch is tone. As far as I know there are no languages where a tone distinction is not at all implemented via F0 differences, but there are very many where the distinction ...
- 77.2k
4
votes
How is Nigerian Standard English categorized?
To the question
Is Nigerian Standard English categorized as a discrete language, a dialect of English, or does it fall under some other category?
the answer is: It is classified as a variety of ...
- 29.2k
4
votes
Accepted
Is there a solution for the ToBI's weakness in showing speech variance?
Here is an outline of what one would need to do to set up a ToBI system for some Kurdish language. I will make up somewhat hypothetical examples to make the point clearer. You first have to establish ...
- 77.2k
4
votes
Accepted
What are the advantages of using ToBI for prosodic analysis?
You can't use the standard f0 analysis. There's no such thing as standard. You need a framework e.g. Autosegmental-meterical Phonology (AM)
supposing you are going to work in the phonological category
...
- 1,245
4
votes
What is the philosophy of prosodic transcription?
We study prosody because we observe that it is a meaningful, functional component of language. We transcribe it with the goal of abstractly understanding the contrastive elements that speakers seem to ...
- 2,472
4
votes
Accepted
Why is the utterance and intonational phrase "post-lexical"?
This is terminology from the theory of Lexical Phonology, which was popular at the time. In that theory, morphology and some parts of phonology are bundled together into a module called "Lexicon", ...
- 77.2k
4
votes
Accepted
What is the phonetic difference between "White House" and "white house"?
You are right to say that the difference between these is one of stress. "White House" has a single stress on the first syllable, "white house" has an equal stress on both syllables.
Linguistically ...
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4
votes
Components that comprise a syllable
According to Draga Zec in The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, the older model of onset, rime, nucleus, coda—
—was superseded by the mora model—
—which can account for everything the notion of 'rime'...
- 4,940
4
votes
Accepted
To what extent can the prosody factors influence the literal meanings or not at all
It's actually the other way around. You don't change your proposition when you change your prosody, instead you produce the correct output (including prosody) based on some system of rules that ...
- 77.2k
3
votes
How can listeners perceive male f0 on the telephone
The fundamental forms the basis for the harmonic series: if F0 is 100 Hz, then harmonics are present at 200, 300, and so on. Humans can 'recover' (perhaps 'hallucinate') the original fundamental from ...
- 2,472
3
votes
Accepted
Prosodic vs Metrical vs Autosegmental accounts of suprasegmental phenomena
"Prosodic phonology" is ambiguous, since it is used to refer to a specific generative theory of structural relations, as well as numerous often non-generative accounts of non-segmental phonology (as ...
- 77.2k
3
votes
Is it accurate to claim that autosegmental phonology is a theory of suprasegmental prosodic phenomena?
Actually, negating the difference between segmental and suprasegmental is what autosegmental phonology is all about (see Goldsmith 1976 and similar publications of the era). The premise of "...
- 77.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Representing tone in feature matrices
The simple existence of level or contoured tones in a language is not a problem for the SPE theory of representations, which is why when the focus was on just reducing tone contrasts to some minimal ...
- 77.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Can word stress always been seen in the signal as increased f0?
No, on numerous levels. On a token level, sometimes a stressed syllable doesn't have higher F0 and could have a lower F0. More systematically, in some dialects of English there are intonational pitch ...
- 77.2k
3
votes
How is Nigerian Standard English categorized?
According to R. Hickey ( Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialect.), the Nigerian English, as most other African Englishes, should be classified as a part of common meta-cluster ...
- 2,771
3
votes
What are the advantages of using ToBI for prosodic analysis?
It’s true that there is a learning curve, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. What does ‘f0 analysis’ mean here? How can you interpret changes in pitch, intensity, duration without an ...
- 2,472
3
votes
Accepted
How is "rising tone" the same in all tonal languages?
Attempts to define tone types (e.g. rising, falling; mid, high, low) in terms of phonetic properties don't go very far, and crash when you try to devise rigorous criteria that apply to all tones ...
- 77.2k
3
votes
what is the (pan) linguistic term for "scare-quotes" intonation
For verbs, under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_moods we find:
optionally sarcastic admirative
inferential, a.k.a. renarrative, oblique
dubitative
You could apply dubitative to intonation ...
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