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Upstep and embedded register levels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2002

Hubert Truckenbrodt
Hubert Truckenbrodt
Affiliation:
University of Tübingen
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Abstract

This article is concerned with an interesting upstep phenomenon in the intonation of some speakers of Southern dialects of German. It experimentally establishes the main properties of this upstep phenomenon, and discusses the theoretical consequences. The upstep occurs on the nuclear pitch accent of a non-final intonation phrase. It targets the phonetic height of the utterance-initial peak, regardless of downstepped peaks that intervene between the initial peak and the upstepped peak. The findings are argued to provide unexpected support for a model of intonation in which downstep among accents can be embedded inside downstep among larger prosodic domains (Ladd 1988, van den Berg et al. 1992). In a combination of that model with an extension of Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988), it is suggested that the choice between downstep and upstep is conditioned by association to higher prosodic constituents in a systematic way.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , May 2002 , pp. 77 - 120
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Bob Ladd, Carlos Gussenhoven and an anonymous reviewer of Phonology for many helpful comments and suggestions in connection with this article. For comments on earlier versions of this work, thanks also to Akin Akinlabi, Paul de Lacy, Caroline Féry, Jennifer Fitzpatrick, Bruce Hayes, Michael Kenstowicz, Aditi Lahiri, Alan Prince, Lisa Selkirk, Donca Steriade and Moira Yip, as well as audiences at Constance University, McGill University, MIT, Rutgers University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Maryland, the University of Potsdam, the Workshop on Focus, Intonation and Phrasing in Freudental 1998, the Workshop Interaktion der Grammatikmodule at the DGfS meeting 1997 and the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaften, Berlin. Many thanks also to Judy Bauer and the editors of Phonology for valuable help with the presentation of the final version, and to Susi Wurmbrand for volunteering her voice for many recordings leading up to the present work. All errors are of course my own. This work was supported by Rutgers University Research Council Grants #2-02189 and #2-02284.