In this paper, we investigate the phonological and phonetic markers of focus and topic intonation in Greek. We have found that both focus and topic are marked by phrasing, type of pitch accent and boundary tone. One difference between the two is that, on the one hand, focus deletes a boundary after the focus word and de-accents all following words. On the other hand, topicalization creates an I...

This paper introduces a new model of prosodic typology by adding a parameter called macro-rhythm to the two known prosodic parameters, types of prominence marking (head, head/edge, edge) and word prosody (stress, tone, lexical pitch accent). Macro-rhythm is a tonal rhythm (a sequence of H/L alternation) in an Intonation Phrase. It captures similarities and differences across languages in terms ...

This paper aims to demonstrate the use of a unit selection corpus, the IMS German Festival synthesis system [1], in carrying out a comprehensive investigation of factors influencing specific aspects of the phonetic realization of tonal categories. The study restricts itself to the alignment of peaks in H*L pitch accents in German. First results confirm not only well-known effects of syllable st...

This paper investigates cumulative effects of strengthening and lengthening on English vowels across two prominencebearing prosodic factors, phrasal accent and prosodic phrase boundary. F1, F2 and duration measures are compared across vowels in three prosodic contexts: ip-medial unaccented, ipmedial accented, and ip-final accented. The results show that for most vowels there is only one degree ...

This paper presents an analysis of affective sentences spoken by a single speaker. The corpus was analyzed in terms of different acoustic and prosodic features, including features derived from the decomposition of pitch contours into phrase and accent curves. It was found that sentences spoken with a sad affect were most easily distinguishable from other affects as they were characterized by a ...

Vowel devoicing at phrase boundaries is shown to depend on sentence mode (statement, question) and information structure (non-contrastive vs. contrastive and broad vs. narrow focus), which affect the type of nuclear accent and boundary tone. In li-questions, considerably less devoicing of the vowels before the phrase boundary is found than in other conditions, because the rising boundary contou...

One of the problems that must be addressed by a textto-speech system is the derivation of pitch accent, marking the distinction between "given" and "new" information in an ut terance. This paper discusses a languageindependent approach to this problem, which is based on focus-accent theory (e.g. Ladd 1978, Gussenhoven 1984, t3aart t987), and implemented in my program P R o s a . This program ha...

This study compares rising contours produced in the context of contrastive topics by French natives and by low and high proficient learners of French with German as mother tongue. Results show a systematic pattern for French natives who mostly produced a final rise LH*, and hardly ever a bridge accent on the whole phrase. Our results on French natives seem to support earlier claims that tonal p...