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1 Rhymes and moras, which will be introduced later, are even smaller prosodic units.Rhymes will be argued later to replace the syllable as the prosodic unit that is the domain in certain phonological processes, and moras do not dominate strings of segments but rather single segments.However, see van Heuven (1994) on the possibility of single segments acting as prosodic domains in general. 2 Cf.Laziczius (1961).1982:220).The intuitive importance of this conglomerate of speech sounds is evidenced by the fact that many of the writing systems that were developed in the past are syllabic, like Hebrew.The decomposition of syllables into separately written segments by the Greeks, which stands at the base of all presently used alphabetic writing systems, was far from trivial.Perhaps surprisingly, a clear-cut definition of this intuitively attractive prosodic unit cannot easily be found.Around 200 BC, Dionysius Thrax defined the syllable as a combination of a vowel with one or more consonants.2 This approach to the syllable is clearly an oversimplification, yet it prevailed until some more phonetically oriented definitions were put forward in the first half of the Twentieth Century.Sweet (1902), for instance, defined the syllable as follows: "[T]he ear learns to divide a breath-group into groups of vowels (or vowel equivalents), each flanked by consonants (or consonantequivalents)-or in other words, into syllable-formers or syllabics and non-syllabics, each of these groups constituting a syllable."Sweet (p.65).More or less simultaneously, the relationship between syllables and sonority was discovered.According to Jespersen (1904) the number of syllables in an utterance is equal to the number of sonority peaks.The sonority of a sound is its loudness relative to that of other sounds with the same length, stress and pitch (Ladefoged 1982:221).This definition allows us to compare the sonority of a certain segment to that of another similar segment.It does not, however, allow a sonority comparison between, for instance, voiced and voiceless segments (the latter have no pitch).In phonology it is commonplace to look upon sonority, in a more abstract sense, as a measure for the "strength" of segments.Given this abstract notion of sonority, the various types of segments we find in languages can be ordered along a phonological "strength scale" (or sonority hierarchy), which is based on phonological processes like lenition and fortition.Thus, vowels are more sonorous than consonants; fricatives, liquids and nasals are more sonorous than stops; and voiced segments are more sonorous than voiceless ones.Note that Ladefoged's definition does not cover all types of comparisons that can be made within the sonority hierarchy.Hence, this hierarchy is only partly supported by phonetic evidence.Unfortunately, to our knowledge, no phonetic research has been devoted to the search for more evidence for the sonority hierarchy.c a t segmental tier Using this kind of structure meant that he could refer to the syllable as a unit, while in the same effort resolving the, at that time still troublesome, ambisyllabicity problem.This problem involves segments that phonologically belong to the two syllables between which they are CHAPTER 1 6 4 The bars over some of the vowels in (4) indicate length.phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions between them that do not hold between the other subsyllabic parts.A notorious example of such a restriction is the impossibility of the sequence "long vowel -velar nasal".Combinations like [o ], [i ] and [a ] are ill-formed in a large number of languages.Another argument for the constituency of nucleus and coda is of a more phonetic nature.A long history of experiments shows that there is a temporal relation between a vowel and a following consonant in a large number of languages (cf.Peterson & Lehiste 1960;Chen 1970).The experiments reveal some sort of "trade-off " relation between the nucleus and the coda, but not between the nucleus and the onset.For instance, long vowels are often followed by short consonants and short vowels by long consonants, and voiced consonants are preceded by longer vowels than voiceless consonants (cf.English bed vs. bet).These observations show that the durations of the nucleus and coda are interrelated.Following Lehiste's ( 1971) assumption that such temporal relationships between two segments reflect programming as a unit at some higher level, we insert a node called the rhyme under the syllable node (cf.Fudge 1969;Selkirk 1978).This new node dominates the nucleus and the coda, which results in the syllabic structure presented in (3).(3) σ Onset Rhyme Nucleus Coda st a ndNot only does this rhyme unit indicate which group of segments must be identical when we create two rhyming lines of a poem, it is also very useful in many phonological rules.An example of such a rule is provided by Lass (1984).He states that, in Old English noun declensions, the onset-rhyme division is needed to account for the presence of a suffix.Let us look at some of Lass' data.4 (4) a. Neuter a-stem, nom pl : col-u 'coals' word 'words' lim-u 'limbs' wı ¯f 'women' CHAPTER 1 8 5 But see section 6.3 for arguments that spectral slope is a better correlate of loudness.weight are tightly bound to the field of stress assignment rules.It is indeed the case that (metrical) rules for stress assignment have formed the major reason to postulate the rhyme as a subsyllabic constituent in the first place.In the next section we will discuss these stress rules and their relevance to syllable constituency. The syllable in stress rulesOne of the prosodic phenomena that were mentioned in section 1.1 was stress.Just as for the syllable, we observe that stress is being recognised in phonological theory while a unified and undisputed phonetic description of the acoustic properties of stress has not yet been found.Again, the speaker's intuition on stressed and unstressed syllables in an utterance is often quite clear.Yet, these intuitions are difficult to translate into acoustic correlates that define a stressed syllable.Over the years, numerous phonetic studies have shown that there does not seem to be a single physical correlate of stress.It is more likely that a set of related correlates causes a syllable to sound stressed to a listener, and this set is probably not the same across languages.At the abstract level, however, investigations into the rules that govern the linguistic structures related to stress abound.Above, we referred to the relevance of such abstract rules for the division of the syllable into onset and rhyme.This will be discussed below, after a more elaborate introduction to stress.These considerations conclude the background that is necessary to formulate the main research question of this thesis, which will be undertaken in section 1.2.3. Stress: an introduction to the phenomenonSweet (1902:47) defines force (or stress) by the effort with which breath is expelled from the lungs.He identifies 'loudness' as the acoustic correlate of stress.There is a, perhaps not so obvious, discrepancy between Sweet's definition of stress and his acoustic correlate.The effort with which breath is expelled is definitely speaker oriented, while loudness is a perceptually (read 'for the listener') defined property of speech that is correlated with the intensity of the speech signal.5 This is probably what Jones (1950) had in mind when he introduced the distinction between stress (speaker activity) and prominence (effect perceived by the listener).CHAPTER 1 10 6 Van Heuven (1994) defends the claim that only the first segment of the word is in focus in these cases.intonation as a means to encode discourse information or attitude.For instance, the fact that some part of a sentence contains relevant new information is communicated by the speaker to the listener through focus on that particular part (Ladd 1980).Focus is realised by an accent-lending pitch movement on the prosodic head of a focus domain, which can be a word or word group (Bolinger 1958;Terken 1984Terken , 1991)), as in (6a).(6) a.What did you say?I said [coffee] +F b.I wrote [tof] +F fee, not [cof] +F fee c.I told you to [type] +F coffee, not [write] +F it d.Now I heard cof[fin] +F , not cof[fee] +FIn (6a) the word coffee is in focus.The accent occurs on the first syllable, which is the prosodic head of the word.Accents also appear when we contrast two items in one sentence, as in (6b).In such cases even single syllables can be in focus.The prosodic heads that are accented through pitch movement are the stressed syllables of toffee and coffee.6 In (6c), however, the stressed syllable of coffee is not in the focus domain, and therefore, not associated with a pitch change.Yet, not many speakers of English will have difficulties in identifying the stressed syllable of coffee in (6c).In special circumstances, it may even be the case that focus ends up on the unstressed syllable, as we can see in (6d).These examples show that the success of pitch as a correlate of stress crucially depends on the intonation of the sentence, and that pitch is not a necessary cue for stress.They also show that it is imperative that we consider stress and accent to be two separate linguistic phenomena (Beckman 1986;Sluijter 1995).In the remainder of this thesis we view (pitch) accent as the phonetic realisation of prominence in speech, through which the speaker conveys focus to the listener in languages like English and Dutch.So far we have not been able to give a proper definition of stress.Considering the difficulties in pinpointing the acoustic properties of stress, we may assume that a phonetic definition of stress that holds true for all languages, and takes into consideration all the acoustic correlates, will be difficult to find.The fact that stress can be expressed in so many phonetically different ways probably means that we are dealing with an abstract phenomenon here.The observation that
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