Bishop – Introduction to Intonational Phonology

This course is an introduction to the Autosegmental-Metrical framework for studying sentence-level prosody and intonation. A major goal will be to cover the basics of phonological transcription of intonation, concentrating first on English intonation using the ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) system. Towards the end of the class, we will contrast the structure of English with some of the other languages that have been well studied in the AM framework (e.g., Japanese, Korean, Bengali, possibly French) and discuss a broader prosodic typology. This course will provide tools for sophisticated prosodic analysis that can be applied to the study of phenomena in segmental phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, information structure, and sentence processing, to name a few. An emphasis will be on relating our phonological model of prosodic and intonational structure to these other areas of inquiry.

Tentative schedule of topics

Monday

The Half-Tamed Beast: Intonation vs. paralanguage.Ÿ Overlapping (but not quite competing) research programs. Introduction to structural prominence

Tuesday

More on prominence: Pitch accents in MAE_English.Ÿ Does contrastive focus have a special realization?

Wednesday

The prosodic hierarchy.Ÿ Intonational marking of phrase edges.

Thursday

Group discussion of ToBI transcriptions.

Friday

Prosodic typology

Some tentative readings

  • Beckman, M. & Ayers Elam, G. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI Labelling (Ver. 3). Ms, The Ohio State University.
  • Beckman, M. & Edwards, J. (1994). Articulatory evidence for differentiating stress categories. In P. Keating (Ed): Papers in laboratory phonology III. Cambridge University Press. (pp. 7–33).
  • Beckman, M., Hirschberg, J. & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2005). The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. In: Jun (2007).
  • Beckman, M. & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986) Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook, III, 15-70.
  • Hellmuth, S. & Chahal, D. (2014). The intonation of Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic. In: Jun (2014).
  • Jun, S.-A. (2007). Korean intonational phonology and prosodic transcription. In: Jun (2007).
  • Jun, S.-A. (2007). Prosodic Typology I. Oxford University Press.
  • Jun, S.-A. (2014). Prosodic Typology II. Oxford University Press.
  • Khan, S. (2014) The Intonational Phonology of Bangladeshi Standard Bengali. In: Jun (2014).
  • Ladd, R. (1996/2008). Intonational Phonology. Cambridge University Press.
  • Ladd, R. (2014). Simultaneous structure in phonology. Oxford University Press.