6 - Linguistic generalizations

Summary

Introduction

Our study of Dutch intonation has resulted in a melodic description of (nearly) all possible pitch contours of that language. The inventory of permissible contours is explicitly defined by the ‘grammar of intonation’, presented in chapter 4 (propositions 4, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3). Contours are global melodic entities that tend to coincide with clauses or complete utterances. They can be broken down into the structural units that we labelled Prefix, Root and Suffix configurations, each of which consists of one or more discrete pitch movements. The atomistic pitch movements are the elementary descriptive units of our melodic model. We have supplemented their perceptual characterization with an acoustic definition that can be used to control the F_o parameter of synthetically produced speech. We have also established a link between perceptually relevant pitch changes and the voluntary manoeuvres that a speaker executes in order to produce variations in the course of F_o. Finally, we have gained some insights as to how the infinite variety of pitch contours relates to a restricted set of more abstract melodic categories or intonation patterns.

Generally speaking, different contours belong to the same intonation pattern if they share a common Root configuration, even if they differ as to the number or type of their Prefixes, or with regard to the presence or absence of a Suffix. Such fundamental differences and correspondences are not clearly reflected in the ‘grammar of intonation’, which is primarily a generative device that produces well-formed strings of pitch movements without much internal structure. In particular, the grammar fails to explain how different Prefixes relate to each other and how the same Root can manifest itself in more than one melodic shape.