Using Mimicry to learn about Phonology

We often think of intonational phonology in terms of discrete entities: accents which fall into just a few categories (Gussenhoven 1999; Ladd 1996; Beckman and Ayers Elam 1997). In this view, accents in intonation correspond to phonemes in segmental phonology (except that they cover a larger interval). They have a rough correspondence to the acoustic properties of the relevant region and they are a small set of atomic objects that do not have meaning individually but they can be combined to form larger objects that carry meaning. For segmental phonology, the larger objects are words; for intonation, the larger objects are tunes over a phrase.