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1. Online construction of implicature through contrastive prosody

   Dennison, H. Y.; Schafer, A. J. (May 2010, Speech prosody)

   Little experimental evidence exists for how prosodic/ intonational information might affect the generation of an implicature. We provide online evidence that the combination of an L+H* pitch accent and an L−H% boundary tone work together to imply a contradiction, and that this contour has distinct effects from an L+H* L−L% tune. We also compare the online processing of changes in meaning suggested by prosody versus explicit negation. The results highlight the importance of intonational information in sentence understanding, and the differences in processing prosodically cued contrastive information versus lexical negation. 

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2. A Comparative Analysis of Declarative Sentences in the Spontaneous Speech of Two Puerto Rican Communities

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9030090  

   Visconte, Piero; Sessarego, Sandro; Rao, Rajiv (March 2024, Languages)

   This paper applies the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices (Sp_ToBI) annotation conventions to compare the intonational contours of declarative sentences in two varieties of Puerto Rican Spanish: (1) San Juan Spanish, spoken in the capital city of San Juan, and (2) Loíza Spanish, an Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken in Loíza. The geographical proximity between these two municipalities entails constant contact within a shared linguistic space. However, speakers from San Juan perceive Loíza as a municipality that has its own peculiar way of speaking. The acoustic and phonological analysis was carried out with PRAAT to verify whether pitch accents coincide in the spontaneous speech of the two analyzed varieties. The data we examined contain an overall predominance of the bitonal pitch accents L*+H and L+ 

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3. Paraguayan Guarani: Tritonal Pitch Accent and Accentual Phrase

   Jun, Sun-Ah; Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (August 2022, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA))

   This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type. 

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4. Methods for PoLaR Explorations with Machine Learning: Grammatical Analysis of Intonation without Grammatical Labels

   Veilleux, N. (January 2023, International Congress of Phonetic Sciences)

   This study provides a proof-of-concept for a new method for analyzing intonational form and meaning, demonstrated by analysis of mirative utterances in American English. Here, K-means clustering using measures derived from PoLaR labels (i.e., TCoG) revealed emergent clusters of pitch accents that are suggestive of familiar phonological categories (e.g., MAE_ToBI L+H*). A Random Forest analysis then classified utterance-level meaning based on measures from both smaller granularity (related to individual pitch accents) and larger granularity (related to utterance level meaning), showing >85% correct categorization of exclamative vs filler sentences. This work has implications for how to model mappings between prosody and meaning, especially where existing phonological categories alone don’t identify semantic/pragmatic categories. 

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5. Paraguayan Guarani: Tritonal Pitch Accent and Accentual Phrase

   Jun, Sun-Ah; Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (August 2022, Interspeech)

   This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type. Index Terms: intonation, Paraguayan Guarani, tri-tonal pitch accent, Accentual Phrase, prosodic typology 

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