Universitọt Osnabrỹck-UPF
rsichelb@ uos.de
Occitan is a Romance language that, like French, accepts pitch movements associated with unstressed syllables. Hualde (2003) notices that “the falling (or low) nuclear accent of Occitan appears to differ from that of the other languages”, arguing that very often he had found “a fall from a preceding syllable with a secondary accent”. The nuclear pitch accent of Occitan disapproval categorical statements consists in a rising-falling contour as described in Fig. 1, and the rise of this contour appears to be linked with the syllable (S-1) that immediately precedes the last stressed syllable of the utterance (S*). That’s why in this case the rise may not be an early rise or a secondary accent, but has to be considered as a leading tone configuration that is part of the pitch accent.
Fig. 1 – Schematic representation of the nuclear pitch accent contour of Occitan disapproval statements. The white rectangles symbolize unstressed syllables (S-2 and S-1 respectively); the grey one, the last stressed syllable of the sentence (S*); and the black line, the stylized F0 curve.
S-2 S-1 S*
In this paper, we focus on the alignment of this rise with regard to the segmental string. We will proceed to the analysis in Praat of recordings of sentences obtained from a situation survey. The methodology we use, based on Prieto (2001), allows getting natural utterances in a semi-directed way by prompting the informers to express their reaction to hypothetical situations of the everyday life. The informers have to express their disapproval to 5 different situations, uttering, for each one, sentences with 12 different expressions in nuclear position: 6 paroxitonic ones and 6 oxitonic ones, all with a [CV(S-1) ã ‘CV(S*) (ã
CV)] final structure.
The analysis of a pilot study shows that the F0 turning points of the rise of this pitch accent are quite constantly anchored to particular segmental points of S-1:
there appears to be a clear F0 turning point coinciding with the onset of S-1 which has to be interpreted as a L (low) target, and a peak occurs mainly at the end of S-1 or sometimes during the onset of S*, before pitch falls. Hence, this pitch accent has two leading tone targets L and H, both coinciding with S-1, and it ought to be labeled LH+L*.
Very little literature has taken into account the description of leading tones alignment. Pierrehumbert (1980) and Pierrehumbert and Steele (1989) affirm that unstarred tones lead or trail the starred one “by a given time interval”, and as a consequence, may spread over one or more syllables depending on the speech rate and the length of the segments. To our knowledge, only Grice (1995) proposes that leading and trailing tones may present two different systems of
alignment: she claims that, whereas trailing tones occur a fixed interval of
“normalized time” after the starred tone, leading tones appear to be linked to the syllable preceding the accented one (if there is one available).
It arises from our study that both L and H leading tone targets of Occitan disapproval statements are aligned with the syllable preceding the accented syllable. This represents evidence bearing out Grice’s theory about the alignment of leading tones: leading tones must not be aligned according to time but to syllables.
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