The Manifestation of Linguistic Information in Prosodic Features of Finnish

The current paper presents a preliminary study of Finnish prosody using a quantitative model. In a small corpus of segmentally identical utterances the focus, the sentence mode and the place of the phrase boundary were systematically varied. Following the rationale of MFGI, the MixdorffFujisaki Model of German intonation, the phonetic properties of the contrast-lending intonemes were examined. These properties differ strongly from those of German: Although the place of narrow focus is marked by higher accent command amplitudes, tone switches on pre-focal and postfocal accents are never completely deleted. Yes/no questions with final rises are perceived as less natural by Finnish listeners than those marked by a question particle. Nonterminal utterances are not marked by clear rises, but rather by a fall that does not reach the lower edge of the speaker's F0 range as in declaratives.