Between Fall and Fall-Rise: Substance-Function Relations in German Phrase-Final Intonation Contours
G. Ambrazaitis^a,b

^aInstitute of Phonetics and Digital Speech Processing (IPDS), University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany, ^b Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund, Sweden

Phonetica 2005;62:196-214
(DOI: 10.1159/000090098)

  Abstract

This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has not been established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end of the phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum between falling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR dif-fer with respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal, and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps. First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the nec-essary background information on the phonetics of the contours. In the second step, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using the paradigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically gener-ated stimuli on nine semantic scales, such as ‘impolite/polite’. The hypotheses were generally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement, while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F in that it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impolite-ness. The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the addition of a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F0 ; the functional consequence is a reduction of communicated dominance.

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