School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Intonational rises and dialogue acts in the Australian English map task
    FLETCHER, J ; STIRLING, LF ; MUSHIN, I ; WALES, RJ (Sage Publications, 2002)
    Eight map task dialogs representative of General Australian English, were coded for speaker turn, and for dialog acts using a version of SWBD-DAMSL, a dialog act annotation scheme. High, low, simple, and complex rising tunes, and any corresponding dialog act codes were then compared. Dialog acts corresponding to information requests were consistently realized as high-onset high rises ((L +)H*H-H%). However low-onset high rises (e.g., L*H-H%) corresponded to a wider range of other "forward-looking" communicative functions, such as statements and action directives, and were rarely associated with information requests. Low-range rises (L*L-H%), by contrast, were mostly associated with backward-looking functions, like acknowledgments and responses, that is they were almost always used when the speaker was referring to what had occurred previously in the discourse. Two kinds of fall-rise tunes were also examined: the low-range fall-rise (H *L-H%) and the expanded range fall-rise (H* + L H-H%). The latter shared similar dialog functions with statement high rises, and were almost never associated with yes/no questions, whereas the low-range fall-rises were associated more with backward-looking functions, such as responses or acknowledgments. The Australian English statement high rise (usually realized as a L* H-H% tune) or "uptalk," appears to be more closely related to the classic continuation rises, than to yes/no question rises of typologically-related varieties of English.
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    An EMA/EPG study of vowel-to-vowel articulation across velars in Southern British English
    Fletcher, J (Taylor & Francis, 2004-09-01)
    Recent studies have attested that the extent of transconsonantal vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is at least partly dependent on degree of prosodic accentuation, in languages like English. A further important factor is the mutual compatibility of consonant and vowel gestures associated with the segments in question. In this study two speakers of standard southern British English produced sequences of [symbols: see text] sequences where the identity of V was either /i/ or /a/, and nuclear accent placement was varied systematically. A combined technique of EPA and EMA was used, as well as spectrographic measures. Results indicate that there were only minimal transconsonantal coarticulatory effects between the two full vowels /i/ and /a/, but there was evidence of dissimilation of the flanking vowels, particularly in /'kaki/ and /'kika/ sequences, suggesting that prosodically strong vowels resist vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Initial schwa, however, was highly coarticulated with following /a/ and /i/, and the spatial extent of this coarticulatory effect was correlated with degree of accentuation, particularly in the case of a following /i/ vowel. The velar stops showed a high level of coarticulation with flanking /i/ vowels, supporting earlier claims by Fowler and Brancazio, that this consonant is 'less' resistant to coarticulatory pressures than others in English.
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    An acoustic phonetic analysis of intonational prominence in two Australian languages
    FLETCHER, J ; EVANS, NRD (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
    The intonational typology of two Northern Australian languages, Dalabon and the Kundedjnjenghmi dialect of Bininj Gun-wok, suggests that these languages can be analyzed within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonation as having two kinds of intonational events that serve to demarcate the boundaries of intonational phrases: pitch accents and boundary tones. Both languages have also previously been described as having lexical stress. In this study, the acoustic correlates of syllables associated with intonational pitch accents, were measured, namely, F0, duration, RMS amplitude and vowel quality, in one lengthy narrative text from each language. The duration of intonational phrase-final syllables was also measured. Results indicate that syllables associated with pitch accents are phonetically lengthened and have marginally higher RMS amplitude. However, there is little variation in vowel quality due to the presence of a pitch accent or intonational prominence. Final syllables are also lengthened at intonational phrase edges, indicating that duration is a cue to this level of prosodic constituency in these languages.
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    Tense Beyond the Verb: Encoding Clausal Tense/Aspect/Mood on Nominal Dependents
    NORDLINGER, R ; SADLER, LS (Springer Science+Business Media, 2004)