Intonational signalling of sentence type in northern Welsh

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This paper examines the effect of sentence type on the scaling and alignment of pitch peaks in Anglesey Welsh. The analysis considered a corpus of speech from six Welsh-English bilingual speakers. The sentence types considered for analysis were statements, yes-no questions, wh-questions and declarative questions. It was found that across speakers the pitch peaks were scaled higher in questions than in statements. Furthermore there was gradable scaling in nuclear pitch peaks as a function of the lexical marking of interrogativity available in the sentences. This ties in with Haan’s Functional Hypothesis [5] whereby less lexically marked questions are predicted to be more intonationally marked. It was also found that for prenuclear pitch peaks there was a tendency for later alignment as a function of the lexical cues for interrogativity, although this later alignment was not present in nuclear position.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015)
Publication statusPublished - 2015

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