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Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2023

Mary Baltazani*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Joanna Przedlacka
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Özlem Ünal-Logačev
Affiliation:
Istanbul Medipol University, Istanbul, Turkey
Pavel Logačev
Affiliation:
Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
John Coleman
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: mary.baltazani@phon.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Asia Minor Greek (AMG) speakers cohabited with Turkish speakers for eight hundred years until the 1923 Lausanne Convention, which forced a two-way mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece and severed their everyday contact. We compare the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of first-generation AMG speakers born in Turkey with three subsequent generations born in Greece. We examine how long contact effects in intonation persist after contact has ceased, through comparison of the f0 patterns in four generations of AMG speakers with those of their Athenian Greek- and Turkish-speaking contemporaries. The speech of the first-generation of AMG speakers exhibits two patterns in the f0 curve shape and time alignment of the continuation rises, one Athenian-like and one Turkish-like. Over subsequent generations use of the latter diminishes, while the Athenian pattern becomes more frequent, indicating intergenerational change.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1. Number of tokens and speakers per language variety and generation

Figure 1

Figure 1. Representative examples of continuation rise tunes in Athenian (top) [erɣaˈzotane] “ (she was) working” and Turkish (bottom) [maˈsaja oˈturmadan] “Before sitting at the table.” The rectangles near the center of each figure indicate the nuclear vowel, transcribed in bold.

Figure 2

Figure 2. An example of a tenth-order polynomial fitted to the f0 contour of an utterance. Top: the smooth modeled curve is superimposed on the observed curve, which is characterized by rapid pitch perturbations, some due to consonantal onsets or offsets. Note the two voiceless stretches in the observed data at around 50 and just before 100 cs. Bottom: The modeled f0 maxima and minima locations are indicated by stars at the relevant times.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Top: Praat waveform with a pitch track exhibiting several octave errors. Bottom: The observed pitch track (circles), the modeled curve fitted to the pitch track (dashed curve) and the difference between observed data and polynomial model (solid grey line). Such octave errors are indicated by a spike in the difference signal (solid grey line) reaching either of the two faint grey horizontal dashed lines (showing a difference of ±12 semitones). The pitch track shows three octave jumps downwards at around 10, 20, and 70 cs. The large jump upwards of 20 semitones at around 35 cs is a 12-semitone restoration of the previous pitch tracking error, added to a genuine f0 movement of 8 semitones. The jump upwards at around 75 cs is a return from the previous error at around 70 cs.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Fourth-order polynomial fitted to the region of interest of an AMG continuation rise, the f0 contour from the beginning of the nuclear vowel to the end of the utterance. Above: the smooth modeled f0 curve (dashed line) is superimposed over the observed data (continuous line). Below: The same fitted curve with axes normalized to the interval [−1, 1].

Figure 5

Figure 5. Fourth-order orthogonal polynomial components of typical examples of Athenian and Turkish continuation rise contours.

Figure 6

Figure 6. Probability density functions of hypothetical mixture distributions (solid lines), and their component distributions (dotted and dashed lines), for different mixture parameters λ (columns) and different distances between the modes of the mixture components (rows).

Figure 7

Figure 7. Examples from the same AMG generation 1 speaker producing a Turkish-like (top) [istoˈria] “…story…” and an Athenian-like (bottom) [taˈmeri] “The places” continuation rise. Rectangles indicate the nuclear vowel, transcribed in bold.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Comparison (from top left to bottom right) of M-OR-W, WAVE, PARABOLA, SLOPE, AVERAGE coefficients and trough alignment in continuation rises produced by Turkish speakers of five different regional varieties (Turkish speakers in the Doegen archive were from the Ottoman Empire, in present-day Romania).

Figure 9

Figure 9. Histogram of coefficients c1 to c4 and L tone alignment τ by dialect and speaker generation. Vertical dashed lines correspond to the medians of the observations among speakers of Athenian (light grey) and Turkish (dark grey) over all generations. The histogram for AMG (mid grey) is overlaid with both median lines, for reference.

Figure 10

Figure 10. Estimates of λ, the proportion of Athenian-like utterances, for each generation. Circles indicate the median of the posterior distribution, thin horizontal lines represent the 90% credible intervals of each parameter estimate, while thick horizontal lines indicate 60% credible intervals.

Figure 11

Table 2. Results of the model comparisons between (i) the baseline linear mixed effects model and (ii) the Gaussian mixture model for the coefficients c1−c4, and τ using PSIS-LOO CV estimates of elpd (Vehtari et al., 2017). Larger elpdLOO values indicate more parsimonious models. Positive ΔelpdLOO values indicate that the Gaussian mixture model provides a more parsimonious account than the baseline linear mixed-effects model

Figure 12

Table 3. Mean estimated proportion (λ) of Athenian-like parameter values in AMG by generation (left column) and 90% credible interval (CI; right column)

Figure 13

Figure B1. Fourth-order orthogonal polynomial analysis of typical examples of Athenian and Turkish continuation rise contours (top left panels); asterisks: measured f0, dashed line: fitted polynomial. The effect of setting each component to zero is shown in each of the other five panels, for each of the two examples.

Figure 14

Table C1. Key assumptions of the Gaussian mixture model of AMG intonation

Figure 15

Table C2. Successive differences contrast matrix for generation

Figure 16

Table C3. Prior distributions for all model parameters except σS.

Figure 17

Table C4. Prior distributions for model parameter σS.

Figure 18

Table D1. Successive differences contrast matrix for dialect

Figure 19

Table D2. Prior distributions for all model parameters except σS.

Figure 20

Table D3. Prior distributions for model parameter σS.