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AbstractThis study aimed to investigate the intonation pattern of Kashani utterances with broad, narrow, and contrastive focuses on different syntactic structures, which were obtained by changing the order of verbs, subjects, and objects. Our data included 4 sentences produced in 3 syntactic structures with a broad focus, 1 syntactic structure with a narrow focus, and 1 syntactic structure with a contrastive focus produced by 16 speakers (8 males and 8 females) from Kashan City. The data were recorded in an anechoic chamber with the sampling frequency of 22050 Hz. A total of 320 utterances (4 sentences × 5 cases × 16 speakers) were annotated in the 2 tiers of tone and phone by using Praat software. The fundamental frequency (F0) of each word was measured at 5 intervals. After the average value of F0 was calculated for each word, their pitch contours were drawn. The results showed that the pitch contours of unmarked Kashani utterances followed a falling pattern. Moreover, the pitch contours were sensitive to the position of each verb as the sentence nucleus. "Verb" was the last constituent that received the pitch accent in a sentence, while it de-accented the constituents coming after it. Finally, the focal constituents appeared at the end of the sentences with narrow or contrastive focuses. These constituents had high prominence and amplitude compared to the other constituents in the sentences. In addition, alignment of the accent peaks in all the accented syllables corresponded to the vowels of the next syllables. The results of this research could be helpful in understanding the typologies of languages and dialects and identifying speakers of varied dialects.Keywords: Intonation pattern, Information structure, Focus, Fundamental frequency, Alignment, Kashani dialect IntroductionThe present paper investigated the intonation patterns of Kashani utterances in different syntactic structures with varied types of focuses. The study was based on the principles of Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) phonology. In this approach, the intonation structure of speech is represented as the sequence of the two tones of L (low tone) and H (high tone) in a separate layer.Pitch accent marks prominence of a particular constituent compared to the other constituents of a sentence, which can be placed merely on the accentuated syllable in a word (Bijankhan, 2013: 11). The stressed syllable is predictable. In other words, the lexical stress of a word is an abstract concept with a predetermined position. According to Bijankhan (2013), Eslami (2005), and Sadeghi (2018), lexical stress occurs on the final syllable in Persian words. On the other hand, placement of the pitch accent is tied to sentence intonation. It can occur to any constituents that the speaker decides to highlight.Brown and Ladd (2003) believed that a nuclear pitch accent is the last pitch accent in a phrase and carries the main information. In other words, they believed that any other constituents coming after the nucleus lack the pitch accent. Sadeghi (2018) proved this to be applicable to Standard Persian. He showed that all the constituents become de-accented after the nucleus. Thus, any constituents coming after the verb become de-accented regardless of their types. Therefore, verb position can affect the intonation structure of a sentence.The focus on the information structure makes the part carrying new information. The part containing old information is called the ground (Lambercht, 1994; Halliday, 1967). Sadeghi (2018) demonstrated that focus and ground are usually distinguished based on their preceding linguistic context. This can be the case in question/answer pairs as well. Sentence intonation pattern, pitch accent of constituents, and pitch accent position are determined by word order, sentence type, and speaker’s intention to highlight a specific part of a sentence. Therefore, variation in the intonation pattern of a sentence can be observed via the sentence information structure. Pitch accent plays an important role in investigating the sentence information structure and identifying the focus.The present paper aimed to answer the following questions:What are the intonation patterns of Kashani utterances with a broad focus and unmarked word order, i.e., SOV?How does the position of the verb as a sentence nucleus affect the pitch contour of adjacent constituents in Kashani utterances with a broad focus?How do focal constituents with narrow and contrastive focuses affect the pitch contour of their adjacent constituents? Materials and MethodsThe stimuli included 5 syntactic structures with different focus types: 3 structures with a broad focus, 1 structure with a narrow focus, and 1 structure with a contrastive focus. Each syntactic structure was represented with 4 sentences. Therefore, a total number of 20 target sentences (5 cases × 4 sentences) were recorded from 8 male and 8 female Kashani speakers with an average age of 26.8 years. The recordings were made in an anechoic chamber at the Phonetics Laboratory of Alzahra University at the sampling frequency of 22050 Hz. The final data consisted of 320 utterances (5 cases × 16 speakers × 4 sentences).The data were manually labeled in the 3 layers of phonetic chain, intonation boundary, and syllable by using Praat software, version 6.0.52 (May 2, 2019). To observe and evaluate changes in F0 values, we measured its values at the beginning of the target word, beginning of the accented syllable, end of the accented syllable, beginning of the vowel of the syllable after the accented syllable, and end of a word in each sentence. Discussion of Results and ConclusionsAccording to the results, the pitch accents of all the constituents in the utterances with the broad focus and SOV syntactic structure remained unchanged. Moreover, the unmarked Kashani utterances showed a falling pitch contour similar to their counterparts in Standard Persian. However, the pitch contours in the other syntactic structures with the broad focus revealed different patterns depending on the syntactic structure and, more specifically, the verb position in the sentence. This indicated that the word order in Kashani dialect could affect the general intonation patterns depending on verb position at the sentence level.The findings of the present study are in line with the results obtained by Sadeghi (2018) for Standard Persian. His findings demonstrated that focus could extend the pitch range. He also found that focus could cause the pick to occur earlier to the focal constituent and make the post-focal constituents de-accented. Moreover, our findings showed that the parameters of alignment and pitch range in Kashani dialect as in Standard Persian acted categorically for distinguishing between the focal and non-focal constituents. These results are also in accordance with those achieved by Smilijanic (2004), Xu & Xu (2005), Manolescu et al. (2009), Wang & Xu (2011), and Vanrell et al. (2013) for Croatian, English, Romanian, Spanish, and Chinese languages, respectively. Furthermore, the results of the current research are congruent with those obtained for Catalan (Vanrell et al., 2013), Italian (Fivela, 2002), Korean (Jun & Lee, 1998), and German (Féry & Kügler, 2008) languages regarding the effects of focus on the occurrence timing of prosodies and occurrence of timely and late picks. |
