The Analysis of Low Accentuation in Estonian
Abstract
In Estonian, as in a number of other languages, the nuclear pitch accent is often low and level. This paper presents two studies of this phenomenon. The first, a phonetic analysis of carefully structured read sentences shows that low accentuation can also spread to the prenuclear accents in an intonational phrase. The resulting sentence contours are used as evidence to evaluate alternative phonological analyses of low accentuation, and H+L* is shown to account best for the data. The second study presents quantitative evidence from fundamental frequency values which supports this phonological analysis. Finally, the distribution of prenuclear pitch accents is discussed. High and low accents can co-occur in an intonational phrase, but only in patterns obeying a specific sequential constraint. A fragment of an intonational grammar for Estonian is presented capturing the observed distributional restrictions.
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1.
1 By analogy with African tone languages, in Pierrehumbert's (1980) original analysis of English, downstep of an H is triggered by the preceding L, and consequently the bitonal H*+L accent is used for representing downstep rather than a fall from a high peak to the following low, as might be expected. In the development of this system into the ToBI transcription system (Silverman et al., 1992), the downstep-inducing H*+L is eliminated and downstepped high tones are marked with the diacritic /! /. Downstep is explicitly indicated rather than implicitly triggered and thus has largely become an independent phonological variable as suggested in Ladd (1983, p. 733).
2.
2 Accent unit is an informal term used here to refer to a sequence consisting of a pitch accented syllable plus zero or more unaccented syllables, and bounded by the next pitch accented syllable or intonational boundary.
3.
3 This term and the following similar terms describing different patterns of low accentuation are specific to the present data consisting as it does of sentences designed to have four pitch accents.
4.
4 Another deviation from Pierrehumbert's grammar is that in Ladd's grammar there is no option for starting the IP without a boundary tone.
5.
5 It could be argued that a “left-to-right” approach such as either Ladd's (1996) or Pierrehumbert's (1980) is counterintuitive, in that it attributes a major choice defining the intonational character of the IP to an arbitrary pitch accent which (though sometimes the nucleus when there is only one low accent) may be a pitch accent of relatively little informational salience embedded in the prenuclear string (like e.g., a3). Exploring alternatives to the “left-to-right” approach, however, lies beyond the scope of this paper.
6.
6 Such peak delay is common also in many other languages and language varieties, for example, American English (Pierrehumbert & Steele, 1989), British English (Ladd, Faulkner, Faulkner, & Schepman, 1999), Northern and Southern German (Atterer & Ladd, 2004), European Portuguese (Frota, 2002), Mexican Spanish (Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg, 1995), West Swedish (Bruce, 2003).
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Article first published: December 2007
Issue published: December 2007
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PubMed: 18330217
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