Lithuanian language intonation: history of research, in the context of language intonology

The linguists Jablonskis (1911) and Durys (1927) were the first to study Lithuanian language intonation. Research on intonation in other European languages (English, Russian) began earlier, in the 16th and 17th centuries (English: Hart (1551) and Butler (1634); Russian: Lomonosov (1743, 1765)). The beginning and the second half of the 20th century were the most productive research periods on Lithuanian language intonation. Intonation was studied by Lithuanian linguists – syntax specialists and phoneticians. A considerable amount of research using methods of experimental phonetics was carried out. The main authors were the syntactician Balkevičius (1963, 1998) and the phoneticians Pukelis (1972) and Bikulčienė (1976), Pakerys (2003), Girdenis (1980; 2003). Variants of the Lithuanian language intonation system inventory are presented in the numerous works of the author. Keywords: intonation, experimental phonetics, intonation units, intonation system of the Lithuanian language, intonation typology.

Formal intonative analysis

There is a general consensus among scholars that one same sentence can be said in different ways. This consensus, however, falls apart when the issues are discussed related to the efficiency of prosody in allowing us to say the very same sequence of segments with different meanings. According to Hirst (1987) e t’Hartet. al. (1990) the difficulties of transcribing prosody overcome the difficulties of transcribing the segmental. They argue that in order to investigate how the melody contributes to the overall understanding of an enunciation a metalanguage was required through which the phenomenon can be discussed. The vocabulary of this metalanguage must consist of appropriate descriptive units through which it is possible to speak of entities and structures at various levels of observation. The semi-automatic analysis, by means of the programs MOMEL and INTSINT, was used in the description of some intonational languages such as: French (di Cristo, 2011), British English (Auran, Bouzon and Hirst, 2004; Brierley, 2011) and analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese rhythm by means of manual INTSINT (Gonçalves, 2000). The present study aims to determine if the program of semi-automatic intonational analysis - INTSINT - is capable of reproduce melodic variation trends of the Brazilian Portuguese. In our proposal, the effectiveness of the program to differentiate between declarative and interrogative forms during reading was evaluated. The following hypotheses were raised: (I) the analysis of intonation with the program INTSINT allows the choice of different phonological theories regarding the use of entonative units;(II) it is possible to distinguish between declarative and interrogative forms by means of coded target points to Brazilian Portuguese. An explanatory analysis of the codification performed by MOMELINTSINT was performed. The corpus of this study consists of 10 short texts, with approximately five sentences that were read by 10 people of the female sex, aged 20-30 years. The acoustic analysis of the data was performed using the program Praatversion 4.4.27, available at www.praat.org (Weenink and Boersma, 1997 ,i contains the necessary extensions for the implementation of the programs MOMEL / INTSINT. These last ones are freely available on the site http://aune.lpl.univaix.fr/~auran/english/ressources.html. The high beginning was common for the declarative and interrogative modalities. This fact was represented by the first target point, coded as T, or the second target point, coded as M; but followed by H, T or U. Nevertheless, they differ at the end of the unit: in interrogative sentences, a sharp increase represented by the symbols T and H can be observed just before the final fall. In declarative sentences it is possible to perceive a rise is followed by a downfall, but not as much and not as systematically as in the interrogative sentences. Far from closing the discussion on intonation units and in the chosen modalities for this study,our initial goal of evaluating the behavior of the program INTSINT against pitch variations was reached. We conclude that the program INTSINT is able to transmit trends and also the general melodic pattern of F0 curve.

Prosody prediction for arabic via the open-source boundary-annotated qur’an corpus

humans or machines. To develop phrase break classifiers, we need a boundary-annotated and part-ofspeech tagged corpus. Boundary annotations in English speech corpora are descriptive, delimiting intonation units perceived by the listener; manual annotation must be done by an expert linguist. For Arabic, there are no existing suitable resources. We take a novel approach to phrase break prediction for Arabic, deriving our prosodic annotation scheme from Tajwid (recitation) mark-up in the Qur’an which we then interpret as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is prescriptive, and signifies a widely-used recitation style, and one of seven original styles of transmission. Here we report on version 1.0 of our Boundary-Annotated Qur’an dataset of 77430 words and 8230 sentences, where each word is tagged with prosodic and syntactic information at two coarse-grained levels. We then use this dataset to train, test, and compare two probabilistic taggers (trigram and HMM) for Arabic phrase break prediction, where the task is to predict boundary locations in an unseen test set stripped of boundary annotations by classifying words as breaks or non-breaks. The preponderance of non-breaks in the training data sets a challenging baseline success rate: 85.56%. However, we achieve significant gains in accuracy with a trigram tagger, and significant gains in performance recognition of minority class instances with both taggers via the Balanced Classification Rate metric. This is initial work on a longterm research project to produce annotation schemes, language resources, algorithms, and applications for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.

The Role of the Experiment in the Study of the Language Material

The article deals with the role of the experiment in the study of the language material. As it is known the learning of voices is very difficult, and it requires great attention. In this case it is necessary to use the opportunities of experimental phonetics. It should be stressed that the role of experiment in the investigation of the language facts through experiment has long been proved. The author uses expedient to investigate the acoustic peculiarities of the language voices. The intonation is used to be closely related to the various emotions of a person in the speech acts. In recent years, the application of principles, conceptual schemes, ideas and concepts derived from psycho- and sociolinguistics and linguistic pragmatics in the field of intonation has become widespread. Intonation must be studied at the communicative level. Semantic categories expressed in intonation units usually refer to the communicative components of speech. In the grammatical structure of the sentence, they can correspond to the composition of any length. Accordingly, the "sphere of activity" of intonation units can have different components from word to sentence at the hierarchical level.

Sequences of Intonation Units form a ~ 1 Hz rhythm

Studies of speech processing investigate the relationship between temporal structure in speech stimuli and neural activity. Despite clear evidence that the brain tracks speech at low frequencies (~ 1 Hz), it is not well understood what linguistic information gives rise to this rhythm. In this study, we harness linguistic theory to draw attention to Intonation Units (IUs), a fundamental prosodic unit of human language, and characterize their temporal structure as captured in the speech envelope, an acoustic representation relevant to the neural processing of speech. IUs are defined by a specific pattern of syllable delivery, together with resets in pitch and articulatory force. Linguistic studies of spontaneous speech indicate that this prosodic segmentation paces new information in language use across diverse languages. Therefore, IUs provide a universal structural cue for the cognitive dynamics of speech production and comprehension. We study the relation between IUs and periodicities in the speech envelope, applying methods from investigations of neural synchronization. Our sample includes recordings from every-day speech contexts of over 100 speakers and six languages. We find that sequences of IUs form a consistent low-frequency rhythm and constitute a significant periodic cue within the speech envelope. Our findings allow to predict that IUs are utilized by the neural system when tracking speech. The methods we introduce here facilitate testing this prediction in the future (i.e., with physiological data).

Sequences of Intonation Units form a ~1 Hz rhythm

Studies of speech processing investigate the relationship between temporal structure in speech stimuli and neural activity. Despite clear evidence that the brain tracks speech at low frequencies (~1 Hz), it is not well understood what linguistic information gives rise to this rhythm. Here, we harness linguistic theory to draw attention to Intonation Units (IUs), a fundamental prosodic unit of human language, and characterize their temporal structure as captured in the speech envelope, an acoustic representation relevant to the neural processing of speech.IUs are defined by a specific pattern of syllable delivery, together with resets in pitch and articulatory force. Linguistic studies of spontaneous speech indicate that this prosodic segmentation paces new information in language use across diverse languages. Therefore, IUs provide a universal structural cue for the cognitive dynamics of speech production and comprehension.We study the relation between IUs and periodicities in the speech envelope, applying methods from investigations of neural synchronization. Our sample includes recordings from every-day speech contexts of over 100 speakers and six languages. We find that sequences of IUs form a consistent low-frequency rhythm and constitute a significant periodic cue within the speech envelope. Our findings allow to predict that IUs are utilized by the neural system when tracking speech, and the methods we introduce facilitate testing this prediction given physiological data.

PHONETIC MEANS EXECUTING THEME AND RHEME FUNCTIONING IN SPEECH

The paper deals with phonetic means executing theme and rheme functioning in speech. The main components of prosodic arrangement of the theme and rheme structure of the utterance are studied, and a problem of structural units of intonation is investigated. Multi-functionality of intonation tends to complicate a study of speech prosody. At the stage of inventory and taxonomic analysis of the formal means of intonation the basic components of prosodic arrangement of the theme and rheme structure of the utterance are considered and a problem of the structural intonation units is studied. The analysis is based on a study of the material essence of the intonation units which differentiation is provided not only by the melodic component but also by speech intensity, speech tempo (including pauses), voice timbre as well as the integral prosodic characteristic — the phrase stress. It is possible to speak definitely about presence of essential differences in the degree of informational melody, speech intensity, tempo and timbre in the context of communication of meanings, and a complex nature of their accomplishment in speech. Therefore, it becomes important to study not just the role of each of these components in the accomplishment of the communicative function of intonation but also to establish their hierarchy, inter-relation and interdependence. Functional analysis of intonation is primarily aimed at specification of the very principle of classification of the intonation structure functional loading. It is advisable to study the relative autonomy of various functions and the nature of their interaction. The list of intonation functions may be limited with such a set: intelligent and logical function (segmentation by syntagms, links between syntagms, actual segmentation, accentual marking of the syntagm elements), differentiation function of the communication types (situations), the function expressing the emotional state and relations and the function that transfers modal relations. At the prosody level the actual segmentation of utterances is accomplished in speech primarily by using tonal and, partially, dynamic means of intonation (the emphasis is often linked to the forceful intonation components — intensity and energy component): at that, in order to identify the content, the place of stress is important as well as certain peculiarities of its accomplishment.