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43 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 ...
Tristan's user avatar
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38 votes
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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 ...
Nardog's user avatar
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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 ...
Uri Granta's user avatar
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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 ...
melissa_boiko's user avatar
17 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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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15 votes
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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 ...
Be Brave Be Like Ukraine's user avatar
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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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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.
hildred's user avatar
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8 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 ...
Draconis's user avatar
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6 votes
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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 ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
5 votes
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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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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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 ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
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'...
melissa_boiko's user avatar
4 votes
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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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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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 ...
Manjusri's user avatar
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3 votes

Sentence stress detection

Searching online returns quite a few results, some of which are quite tailored to your needs: Tepperman, J., & Narayanan, S. (2005, March). Automatic syllable stress detection using prosodic ...
WavesWashSands's user avatar
3 votes

Sentence stress detection

I also don't know of any ready-made tool that does this. It would be very helpful to know roughly what you were hoping to use this for, since that would dictate exactly what kind of tool you would ...
phsyron's user avatar
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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 ...
Adam Bittlingmayer's user avatar
3 votes
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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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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3 votes
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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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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3 votes
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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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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2 votes

How are prosodic phenomena represented in the phonological hierarchy?

I doubt that there is such a hierarchy, with higher level units displaying special behavior which does not emerge from the lower level things they are made up of. Take syllables, for instance. I ...
Greg Lee's user avatar
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2 votes

How does Saussure understand prosodic aspects of language?

I'd guess Saussure would count lexical tone as paradigmatic and intonation as syntagmatic (comparing his remarks about syllable structure). I think that would make both part of langue, but personally,...
Greg Lee's user avatar
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2 votes

Does the Klingon spoken in Star Trek: Discovery present a harsh/ventricular/pressed voice phonation?

This is properly the domain of https://conlang.stackexchange.com , but at least one actor in Discovery (the one who played T'Kuvma) made a point of saying that he wanted his Klingon to sound African (...
Nick Nicholas's user avatar
2 votes

In what sense if f0 not an objective measurement?

The presentation is not challenging "the existence of f0 itself". It is saying that tone is not just pitch (true) and that pitch is not just f0 (true). Tone, in the sense that is being used there, ...
jja's user avatar
  • 314
2 votes

Aren't all spoken languages tonal?

All languages have intonation (at sentence or phrase level), or the rise and fall in speech over an utterance but not all languages are called tonal. Let's take Chinese (which I don't know at all). ...
Lambie's user avatar
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1 vote

How Does Gibberish Differ between Languages?

First you have to define what you mean by "Gibberish". In the modern era, there has been a huge expansion of varieties of gibberish in the form of con-langs such as Klingon, Na'vi or ...
user6726's user avatar
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1 vote

Is there a dataset/list of rules mapping words in sentences to prosodic features?

The prosodic contours of a word will vary greatly, depending on how it is used. This might be because of neighboring words in the sentence, or the information content of the word (new vs. given ...
Adam_G's user avatar
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1 vote

Are there necessary and sufficient features for categorizing tone using only f0?

There are problems with your experimental set-up, but we can fix that. The first is that what you tell me shouldn't count. I might tend to believe certain specialists who have proven to be credible, ...
user6726's user avatar
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1 vote
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Are there necessary and sufficient features for categorizing tone using only f0?

For ease of reference, let's give names to your experiments: Experiment 1: Data: recordings of a few sample syllables. For the sake of argument, let's assume the syllables are canonical recordings, ...
melissa_boiko's user avatar

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