Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T14:15:34.718Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Final Lowering in Kipare*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2008

Rebecca Herman
Affiliation:
Ohio State University

Extract

In many languages, fundamental frequency shows a marked decrease utterance-finally or phrase-finally. Ladefoged (1982) generalises that ‘in nearly all languages the completion of a grammatical unit such as a normal sentence is signaled by a falling pitch’. Bolinger (1978) also writes that ‘the most widely diffused intonational phenomenon seems to be the tendency to “go down at the end”’. These sorts of abrupt decreases which affect only the end of the utterance (known as FINAL LOWERING) are distinct from gradual decreases in fundamental frequency over the course of the entire utterance (known as DECLINATION). Bolinger (1978) notes the same distinction, characterising it as the difference between ‘a rapid downward motion at the very end, usually if not always associated with a terminal accent’ and ‘downward drift from a high beginning’. Final lowering as distinct from declination is documented in Japanese by Poser (1984) and by Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988); in English by Liberman & Pierrehumbert (1984); in Dutch by Gussenhoven & Rietveld (1988); in Danish by Thorsen (1985); in Yoruba by Connell & Ladd (1990) and by Laniran (1992); and in Kikuyu by Clements & Ford (1981) (although not all authors use the exact terminology presented here).

Analyses of final lowering range from attributing final lowering to changes in tonal categories (discussed below in §4) to attributing final lowering to compression of the pitch range in the last section of the sentence (discussed below in §5.1). Tone languages provide an interesting testing ground for analyses of final lowering. Careful experimental study, controlling for the position of a tone from the beginning and from the end of a sentence, is one way to begin to sort out the effects of various factors such as declination and final lowering on fundamental frequency.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ayers, Gayle M. (1994). Discourse function of pitch range in spontaneous and read speech. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 44. 149.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E. (1995). Local shapes and global trends. In Elenius & Branderud (1995). 100107.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary & Janet, Pierrehumbert (1992). Comments on chapters 14 and 15. In Docherty, G. J. & Ladd, D. R. (eds.) Papers in laboratory phonology II: gesture, segment, prosody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 387399.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E., Erickson, DonnaHonda, KiyoshiHirai, Hiroyuki & Niimi, Seiji (1995). Physiological correlates of global and local pitch range variation in the production of high tones in English. In Elenius & Branderud (1995). 638641.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight (1978). Intonation across languages. In Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.) Universals of human language. Vol. 2: Phonology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 471524.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (1981). The hierarchical representation of tone. Harvard Studies in Phonology 2. 50108.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. & Ford, K. C. (1981). On the phonological status of downstep in Kikuyu. In Goyvaerts, D. L. (ed.) Phonology in the 1980's. Gent: E. Story-Scientia. 309357.Google Scholar
Connell, Bruce & Robert Ladd, D. (1990). Aspects of pitch realisation in Yoruba. Phonology 7. 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elenius, K. & Branderud, P. (eds.) (1995). Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Vol. 2. Stockholm: Congress Organizers at KTH and Stockholm University.Google Scholar
Elugbe, Ben Ohi (1977). Some implications of low tone raising in Southwestern Edo. Studies in African Linguistics Supplement 7. 5362.Google Scholar
Entropic Research Laboratory, Inc. (1993). Waves+ 5.0. Washington, DC: AT& T Bell Laboratories.Google Scholar
Grosz, Barbara & Hirschberg, Julia (1992). Some intonational characteristics of discourse structure. In Ohala, J. J., Nearey, T. M., Derwing, B. L., Hodge, M. M. & Wiebe, G. E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1992 International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Alberta: University of Alberta. 429432.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. & Rietveld, A. C. M. (1988). Fundamental frequency declination in Dutch: testing three hypotheses. JPh 16. 355369.Google Scholar
Hermann, Eduard (1942). Problem der Frage. Nachrichten von der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologische Historische Klasse. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. 121408.Google Scholar
Hirschberg, Julia & Pierrehumbert, Janet (1986). The intonational structuring of discourse. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. New York: Columbia University.Google Scholar
Hirschberg, Julia & Ward, Gregory (1992). The influence of pitch range, duration, amplitude and spectral features on the interpretation of the rise-fall-rise intonation contour in English. JPh 20. 241251.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. (1988). The phonology of final glottal stops. WECOL 1. 113130.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon & William, R. Leben (1990). Where phonology and phonetics intersect: the case of Hausa intonation. In John, Kingston & Mary Beckman, E. (eds.) Papers in laboratory phonology I: between the grammar and physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1734.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah & Oh, Mira (1994). A prosodic analysis of three sentence types with ‘Wh’ words in Korean. Proceedings of the 1994 International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. The Acoustical Society of Japan. 323326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D. Robert, Ladd (1994). Constraints on the gradient variability of pitch range, or, Pitch level 4 lives! In Keating, Patricia A. (ed.) Phonological structure and phonetic form: papers in laboratory phonology III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 4363.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter (1982). A course in phonetics. 2nd edn. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Laniran, Yetunde Olabisi (1992). Intonation in tone languages: the phonetic implementation of tones in Yoruba. PhD dissertation, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Liberman, Mark & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1984). Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length. In Aronoff, M. & Oehrle, R. (eds.) Language sound structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 157233.Google Scholar
Miura, Ichiro & Hara, Noriyo (1995). Production and perception of rhetorical questions in Osaka Japanese. JPh 23. 291303.Google Scholar
Newman, Paul & Ma Newman, Roxana (1981). The question morpheme q in Hausa. Afrika und Übersee 64. 3546.Google Scholar
Odden, David (1986a). On the role of the Obligatory Contour Principle in phonological theory. Lg 62. 353383.Google Scholar
Odden, David (1986b) Three dialects of Kipare. In Dimmendaal, G. J. (ed.) Current approaches to African linguistics. Vol. 3. Dordrecht: Foris. 257280.Google Scholar
Odden, David (1994). Adjacency parameters in phonology. Lg 70. 289330.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. PhD thesis, MIT.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet (1990). Phonological and phonetic representation. JPh 18. 375394.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Beckman, Mary E. (1988). Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Poser, William (1984). The phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation in Japanese. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Rietveld, Toni & van Hout, Roeland (1993). Statistical techniques for the study of language and language behavior. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, R. Ruth, (1992). A non-metrical theory of Sukuma tone. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 41. 135148.Google Scholar
Shen, Susan (1990). The prosody of Mandarin Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kim (1987). The structure and processing of fundamental frequency contours. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Snider, Keith & van der Hulst, Harry (1993). Issues in the representation of tonal register. In Hulst, Harry van der & Snider, Keith (eds.) The phonology of tone: the representation of tonal register. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorsen, Nina (1985). Intonation and text in Standard Danish. JASA 77. 12051216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar