Remarks on Word-Prosodic Typology

Word-prosodic typology

Numerous proposals have been advanced as to how prosodic systems should be typologised. In this paper I distinguish two prototype systems, tone and stress accent, which, unlike systems analysed as ‘pitch accent’, have two inviolable, definitional properties: (i) obligatoriness (every word has at least one stress accent) ; (ii) syllable-dependency (the stress-bearing unit is necessarily the syll...

Variation Adds to Prosodic Typology

Variation has not been a major concern of prosodic typologists. Frequently, it is treated as noise in the data and held to conceal what is really important about the prosodic structure of the language. Consequently, most investigations are restricted to a single standard variety and cross-speaker variation is ignored or masked by statistical processing. The results are often assumed to be repre...

On the Six-way Word Order Typology

A number of arguments are given against the traditional word order typology based on the six types SOY, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, and in favour of an alternative typology based on two binary parameters OV vs. VO and SV vs. VS. The arguments given include ones based on various advantages of collapsing VSO and VOS into a single type, the infrequency of clauses containing a noun subject and nou...

Automatic prominence identification and prosodic typology

This paper presents a follow up of a study on the automatic detection of prosodic prominence in continuous speech. Prosodic prominence involves two different prosodic features, pitch accent and stress, that are typically based on four acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (F0) movements, overall syllable energy, syllable nuclei duration and mid-tohigh-frequency emphasis. A careful measurem...

Typology of Prosodic Phrasing in Japanese Dialects