Contrastive Study on the types of intonation

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370443
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• Principal Investigator: Masuko Yukie 東京外国語大学, 大学院総合国際学研究院, 教授 (00212209)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: イントネーション / 声調 / ピッチアクセント / ストレスアクセント / トピック

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In order to show the difference of types of intonation, whose systems differ from language to languages,a contrastive study was made. Tone languages, pitch accent language, and stress accent language are contrasted.
The languages that use pitch to distinguish words, such as tone languages and pitch accent language, a stable pitch was not found according to the tones or the accent. Yet,as to tone languages, the pitch curves had distinctive features between the paired tones, and the overall pitch curve was determined dynamically by the combination of tones. While, in the pitch accent word,high morae were not perceived only by high pitch, but the combination of rising and falling pitch contour, and the shape of pitch contour depended on the word accent type. Moreover, stress accent language used intonation to show the topic coupled with the topic marker word.
These results showed the types of intonation of a language are strongly connected with the characteristic of the language.

Free Research Field

音声学、実験音声学