Let’s begin with the question that ultimately motivates this research. Singing in tone languages seems to make contradictory demands on voice pitch. On the one hand, in any language, a song is an arrangement of pitches (‘notes’) based on musical considerations (melody, harmony, verse structure, etc.). On the other hand, in a tone language, song texts (‘words’ or ‘lyrics’) include pitch specific...

this paper investigates the nature of absolutive case and the syntactic mechanisms underlying its licensing. to this end, two recent minimalist approaches to the syntactic derivation of ergative structure will be introduced. drawing on evidence from the syntactic derivation of clauses with intransitive complex predicates in kurdish, it will be established that the absolutive case is checked by ...

In some tone languages, contour tones (pitch changes within a syllable) may be used contrastively. The phonological distribution of contour tones has been of much theoretical interest, as it sheds light on both the representation of tone (Woo 1969; Leben 1973; Goldsmith 1976; Bao 1990; Duanmu 1990, 1994a; Yip 1989, 1995) and the relation between phonetics and phonology (Duanmu 1994b; Gordon 199...

“By a “denoting phrase” I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: [here the reader should supply quotes around each phrase] a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the centre of mass of the Solar System at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round t...

this paper aims to investigate the presence of quantifier phrase and classifier phrase in the dp of sarhadi dialect of the baluchi language. to reach this goal, pseudo partitive constructions and their characteristics in different languages are introduced and then it is shown that determiner phrases containing a classifier in baluchi are examples of juxtaposed pseudo partitive constructions in ...

This article presents a discussion of a number of algorithms being developed which will enable the generation of prosodic structure for Swedish restricted texts. These algorithms, including a word-class tagger, a complex-word identifier and a prosodic parser form part of a linguistic preprocessor to a text-to-speech system for generation of intonation. PROSODIC STRUCTURE One of the goals of cur...

In a comparison of the tonal grammars of two German dialects, Swabian and Upper Saxon German, we observe a particular type of intonation contour that is similar in surface form, yet differs phonologically. Phonetically, the contour’s shape is risingfalling; phonologically, the Swabian contour reads as L*H +L 0%, and the one of Upper Saxon as L+ H*L 0%. Both contours are marked ones, and arise t...

In this paper a tool for the speech signal prosodic analysis is described. The system APA (Automatic Prosodic Analysis) is based on a tool for speech segmentation into syllabic units and on their description in terms of pitch, energy and duration. A particular linear stylization of the fundamental frequency function is proposed, which helps in describing efficiently intonation movements at phra...