An interlinear representation of two utterances containing a fall-rise nuclear tone.  The large circles represent stressed syllables

 

INDEX

Michael Ashby & John Maidment

Introducing Phonetic Science

Chapter 10: Suprasegmentals

Chapter Summary

In this chapter we  look at some aspects of speech which affect units larger than a single speech sound.  Such suprasegmental features include lexical stress and we distinguish between primary and secondary stress and, in variable stress languages, investigate the connection between stress and word class and syllable weight.  In fixed stress languages these considerations are not an issue because stress regularly falls on the same syllable with a word.

We also look at lexical tone which occurs in a large number of the world's languages.  Words in these languages may be distinguished by their pitch pattern alone.  We see that there are two different types of tone language: contour tone languages where some of the tone patterns are falls in pitch, or rises in pitch, or sometimes more complex pitch movements.  Register tone languages on the other hand use only tones which have a level pitch contour.  We see that tones, just like vowels and consonants, may have contextual variants.

Intonation is the use of pitch variation to aid the interpretation of utterances rather than to signal word meaning.  We see that speech can be divided into intonational phrases and that the choices available to the speaker in the placement of IP boundaries may affect how an utterance is interpreted.  Within each IP, the speaker may choose to make certain syllables accented and the final accent, called the nucleus, is a very important way of highlighting information that the speaker considers new or significant. Accented syllables may be associated with pitch contours of different types and the choice of intonational tone is used both to signal speaker attitude and to indicate the speaker’s assessment of whether the information in an IP is new or whether it is already shared knowledge. We also briefly look at key and its role in organizing speech into topics.

Finally, we introduce the concept of paralinguistic features such as tempo, pitch range, loudness, and their role in indicating the speaker’s attitude or mood.