This paper describes a new model of intonation for English. The paper proposes that intonation can be described using a sequence of rise, fall and connection elements. Pitch accents and boundary rises are described using rise and fall elements, and connection elements are used to describe everything else. Equations can be used to synthesize fundamental frequency (F 0 ) contours from these elements. An automatic labelling system is described which can derive a rise/fall/connection description from any utterance without using prior knowledge or top-down processing. Synthesis and analysis experiments are described using utterances from six speakers of various English accents. An analysis/resynthesis experiment is described which shows that the contours produced by the model are similar to within 3.6 to 7.3 Hz of the originals. An assessment of the automatic labeller shows 72% to 92% agreement between automatic and hand labels. The paper concludes with a comparison between this model and o...

This thesis proposes a phonetic model of English intonation which is a system for linking the phonological and F 0 descriptions of an utterance. It is argued that such a model should take the form of a rigorously defined formal system which does not require any human intuition or expertise to operate. It is also argued that this model should be capable of both analysis (F 0 to phonology) and synthesis (phonology to F 0 ). Existing phonetic models are reviewed and it is shown that none meet the specification for the type of formal model required. A new phonetic model is presented that has three levels of description: the F 0 level, the intermediate level and the phonological level. The intermediate level uses the three basic elements of rise, fall and connection to model F 0 contours. A mathematical equation is specified for each of these elements so that a continuous F 0 contour can be created from a sequence of elements. The phonological system uses H and L to describe high and low pi...

This paper argues that focus-ground does not necessarily determine the quantificational structure of focus-sensitive operators. It shows that these operators may express their semantics on partitions other than the focus-ground partition. This means that recursive or overlapping focus-ground partitions are not required in sentences with more than one focus-sensitive operator. The belief that more than one focus-ground partition per sentence may be available appears to rest in part on the assumption that every pitch accent is correlated with a focus in a focus-ground partition. Since sentences may have more than one pitch accent, that means they contain more than one focus. This assumption, however, is unwarranted. Accenting is used as a structural resource in natural language for a number of different reasons. It is shown below that there is no one-to-one correspondence between accent and focus and between accent and an `operator-associated' element.

Segmental factors can causelarge temporal changesin local pitch contours associated with accented syllables (“accent curves”), but these changes are often not phonologically or perceptually significant. Yet, other factors can cause temporal changes that are smaller but nevertheless significant. We propose a model according to which accent curves are (phonologically, perceptually) equivalent when they are generated from the same accent curve template using a shared family of time warp functions. The model is shown to provide a detailed and accurate account of alignment of accent curves over a wide range of segmental configurations. 1.

The Intonational Phrase organization of a sentence is a hybrid beast. It sometimes shows a tight correlation with the semantic properties of the sentence, namely what the sentence means in standard truth conditional terms. It sometimes appears to be a reflex of the Focus structure of the sentence. Sometimes it appears to be correlated with the length of the constituents of a sentence. And sometimes it seems merely to reflect a stylistic option in the utterance of a sentence. This paper centers on the ways in which intonational phrasing in phonological representation is dependent on the properties of the interface syntactic representation, giving but a nod to other factors. It assumes a grammatical architecture in which syntax mediates between phonology and semantics and where the syntax-phonology interface is characterized in terms of a set of optimality theoretic

Speech prosody is manifest in the acoustic signal through the modulation of pitch, loudness, duration, and source characteristics (voice quality), which combine to encode the prosodic structure of an utterance. Prosodic structure defines the location of prominent words and syllables, and the grouping of words into phonological phrases. Prosodic structure, in turn, relates the phonological form of an utterance to its morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic context. The listener’s task in comprehending speech includes decoding prosodic structure to aid in identifying the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic contexts that comprise the meaning of the utterance. The research reported in this dissertation focuses on acoustic and perceptual evidence for prosody in spoken language, and the relationship between prosodic structure and higher levels of linguistic organization. The study adopts a computational approach that employs natural language processing tools, machine learning algorithms, and speech and signal pro-cessing techniques to investigate prosody in speech corpus data. In this study, I show that prosodic features of an utterance can be reliably predicted from a set of features that en-

An individual word, pronounced in isolation, will have a characteristic pronunciation. Yet the pronunciation of a sentence, made up of a sequence of words, is not merely a stringing together of these individual pronunciations. The pronunciation of a sentence, i.e. its phonetic realization, is a function of the surface phonological representation of the

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