Argues that intonation is best analyzed as an overt marking of the focus structure of a sentence. The linguistic level of f-structure in which both topic and focus are identified provides the link between context, interpretation, syntax, and intonation. (Author/VWL)

This article reviews conventions for transcribing suprasegmental features in spoken English. It proposes that symbols based on the International Phonetic Alphabet and its recent extensions be supplemented, in the area of intonation, by selected tonetic stress marks and examples of the autosegmental notation used in the Tone and Break Indices…

Some key issues in the study of intonation in language varieties are presented and discussed with reference to recent research on the intonation of New Zealand English. The particular issues that are highlighted include the determination of the intonational phonological categories of a language variety, and the attribution of varietal differences…

Vocal folds undergo osmotic challenge by mouth breathing during singing, exercising, and loud speaking. Just 15 min of obligatory oral breathing, to dry the vocal folds, increases phonation threshold pressure (P[subscript th]) and expiratory vocal effort in healthy speakers (M. Sivasankar & K. Fisher, 2002). We questioned whether oral breathing is…

Retaining detailed representations of unstressed syllables is a logical prerequisite for infants' use of probabilistic phonotactics to segment iambic words from fluent speech. The head-turn preference study was used to investigate the nature of English- learners' representations of iambic word onsets. Fifty-four 10.5-month-olds were familiarized…

In this paper, a new automatic contour tracking system, EdgeTrak, for the ultrasound image sequences of human tongue is presented. The images are produced by a head and transducer support system (HATS). The noise and unrelated high-contrast edges in ultrasound images make it very difficult to automatically detect the correct tongue surfaces. In…

This paper presents an analysis of the potential problems of importing media communication in the form of a television programme from another culture. In Hong Kong, as elsewhere in the world, the local television companies frequently buy successful television programmes from, for example, the USA or Britain with the expectation that they will be…

Compelling evidence from the literature on English intonation suggests that the tone patterns of some sentence types like lists have been grossly underresearched. This undercharacterization of listing intonation in English is inferable from the paucity of literature on this topic. The main thrust of this study is to report the findings from the…

An analysis of English intonation focuses on fall-rise and rise-fall instruction. Fall-rise intonation marks material from which the speaker would derive a precondition for what he is saying, while rise-fall intonation marks material from which the speaker would derive a consequence from what he is saying based on inversion of the clause where the…

This paper argues that a domain-based approach can be used to explain the complex tonal structure of Xhosa nouns by means of a single H tone spread rule. The argument proposes an H tone-motivated domain structure for every noun type, referred to as Tone Domains (TDs), with the number of TDs determined by the number of lexical H tones in a given…

This article discusses the relationship between intonation and enunciation. The premise is that intonation performs in dependent sentences what allocution and modality perform in independent sentences. (Text is in French.) (AM)

A series of phonetic production and perception experiments were designed to describe the phonological or phonetic domains of two effects in spoken English: final lengthening, generally interpreted as a mark for the edge of some linguistically-defined unit of speech production, and stress-timed shortening, generally interpreted as evidence for…

The evidence on the acquisition of intonation by children is reviewed. Reports on the early use of pitch contours fall into two categories, imitational and differential intonation. While imitational intonation is based on mimicry of adults, differential intonation involves the acquisition of two or three tunes that contrast in meaning from an…

This article points out the contrast that exists both at the morphological and syntactic levels between affirmative and negative sentences in Hindi. This contrast and the structural changes related to it are discussed with specific reference to simple and compound sentences, interrogative sentences and specific elements within sentences. (CLK)

Syntagmatics is the name given to the regular linking of speech units in speaking. In German, a rigid organization gives structural cohesion to the sentence. Ellipsis before a predicate adjective is discussed, wherein the sentence, through word order and intonation, becomes functional, although apparently syntactically anomalous. (Text is in…