Tonal Alignment Defined: The Case of Southern Irish English

This paper proposes to define tonal alignment features as either intrinsic; the default alignment, or extrinsic; the shifts away from the default alignment due to prosodic contextual factors. Intrinsic alignment is different for pre-nuclear (PN) and nuclear (N) accents. This distinction is illustrated for a variety of Irish English (IrE), Drogheda English (DroghE) where the PN and the N peaks of H* accents are intrinsically aligned at a time point 70% ~80% and 60% ~75% into the vowel of the accented syllable, respectively. Extrinsic alignment shifts of PN and N peaks are very small not exceeding the accented vowel boundaries.