THE PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY OF FOCUS MARKING
Simon Ritter & Doris Mücke
IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne
BACKGROUND
RESEARCH QUESTION
DYNAMICS
An Integrated Perspective
Choice of category
~ phonological
Physical realisation
~ phonetic Gradience [1]
Previous work on nuclear pitch accents in German focus marking: Phonological +
phonetic gradience seem to go in the same direction [2, 3].
Dynamic systems help to understand categories as attractors [4].
Everything in a dynamic system is continuous, but there are special stable states the system moves to.
Control parameter k can be scaled to change the attractor landscape.
Dynamic systems have been used to model phonetic and phonological variation
[e.g. 5, 6, 7, 8].
Can an attractor-based account model the phonological + phonetic
gradience found in German focus intonation?
DATA
SIMULATION
CONCLUSION
Nuclear pitch accents of our focus data can be modelled in a dynamic
framework.
Both phonological and phonetic variation is accounted for in a
unified system.
27 native German speakers produce focus structures in a game-like task.
Sentence structure held constant, e.g.
“Er hat den Hammer auf die Wohse gelegt”.
3 focus types: broad, narrow, contrastive
Measure:
Tonal Onglide
falling / negative
falling
Results
-4 -2 0 2 4
0 40 80
-4 -2 0 2 4
0 40 80
-4 -2 0 2 4
0 40 80
broad narrow contrastive
Normalised Onglide
Fr eq ue nc y
Code based on [9], implemented in R & C++.
Find best k by calculating overlap with real data.
𝑉 𝑥 = 1.4𝑥 ' − 𝒌𝑥 * − 2𝑥 ,
𝑉 𝑥 = 𝑥 ' − 𝒌𝑥 * − 𝑥 ,
V(x)
V( x)
rising
-2 -1 0 1 2
-1 .0 0.0 1.0
V(x)
-2 -1 0 1 2
-1 .0 0.0 1.0
x
-2 -1 0 1 2
-1 .0 0.0 1.0
-4 -2 0 2 4
-2 .0 -0 .5 1.0
-4 -2 0 2 4
0 500 1500
-4 -2 0 2 4
-2 .0 -0 .5 1.0
En erg y F re qu en cy
-4 -2 0 2 4
0 500 1500
-4 -2 0 2 4
-2 .0 -0 .5 1.0
En erg y F re qu en cy
-4 -2 0 2 4
0 500 1500
Fr eq ue nc y
Simulated Onglide
k = 0.075 k = 0.625 k = 1.0
rising / positive
Speaker-normalised
16th Conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, June 22 2018
Phonetic gradience: Scaling of rising onglides
Real data
Simulation
Er hat die Zange auf die
Bahwe
gelegt.Er hat die Bürste auf die
Mahne
gelegt.broad narrow contrastive
Rising attractors
-2 -1 0 1 2
-2012
Onglide
Potential Energy
Modes of rising distributions
k = 0 k = 1
k = -0.5
0.8 1.2
broad narrow contrastive
0.8 1.2
broad narrow contrastive
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
-2-101