2. More on the tone tier
-
Tones and fundamental frequency
In interpreting the f0 contour to make the tonal transcription, it is important to keep in mind that several non-tonal aspects of an utterance can also strongly influence the fundamental frequency pattern. One of the most ubiquitous of these influences is the way in which consonant segments in the utterance interrupt the smooth course of the f0. Voiceless stops such as [p] and [t] and voiceless fricatives such as [f] and [s] create `holes' in the f0 contour just by being voiceless. Moreover, it is not possible usually to read the intended pitch during a voiceless consonant by interpolating from the last f0 value before voice offset to the first f0 after voice onset because obstruent consonants (stops, fricatives, affricates) all cause dramatic perturbations in the fundamental frequency contour over and above any interruption of voicelessness per se. As an `intrinsic' characteristic of its voiceless specification, a voiceless obstruent is usually associated with a dip into the consonant constriction and a dramatic fall starting from a much higher frequency just after the consonant release. Even voiced obstruents disturb the f0 contour; a voiced stop or fricative can be associated with a fall into and rise out of an often quite-deep valley during the consonants constriction. Utterance <<blond-baby1>> illustrates some of these effects. There is a dip in the f0 around 1.9 s into the file for the [d] at the beginning of "difference" and the sharp fall around 5.29 s right after the [p] in "pink". (To be sure, the perturbation caused by the [p] here is very small compared to many cases of voiceless obstruents that we have seen.)
EXAMPLE <<blond-baby1>>: what's the difference among my long memory H* !H* L-L% L+H* !H* H-H% your blond baby and the pink carpeting L+H* *? !H* L-H% L* L* H* L-L%
In interpreting such `intrinsic' segmental effects, it is important to note the actual voicing of the consonant, and not simply its phonemic status. For example, phonemically voiced obstruents in stressed syllable initial position for many speakers are not always really voiced. Note, for example the /b/ of "blond" at about 3.95 to 4.0 s in <<blond-baby1>>, which is voiceless unaspirated and has f0 perturbing characteristics more like those of the /p/ of pink. Also, the consonant /t/ in American and Australian English is usually a voiced flap (a short [d]-like segment) when it begins an unstressed syllable, as in the /t/ of "carpeting" in example utterance <<flap2>>. Similarly, /h/ is often voiced between vowels. Thus, the perturbation caused by these two phonologically voiceless consonants is often like that for a /d/ or a /v/, rather than like a true [t], as shown by the /h/ in example utterance <<voiced-h>> (at around 3.04s).
EXAMPLE <<flap2>>: The pink carpeting.H* H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<voiced-h>>: Give him a hand with that. H* L-L%
Example utterance <<flap>> gives another environment where flapping is common; see the flapped /t/ across the word boundary at around 1.34s. The flapping here is also important for transcribing break indices (see Section 3.2).
EXAMPLE <<flap>>: Don't hit it to Joey. H* L*+!H L-L%
Another kind of problem in interpreting the f0 contour comes from shifts into voice qualities other than normal modal phonation. For example, for most speakers, subglottal pressure falls very sharply at the very end of an utterance. If the cross-glottal pressure difference becomes very weak, there may no longer be good glottal closings -- i.e. the phonation may become quite breathy -- so that even fairly robust pitch-tracking algorithms can easily fail. For some speakers this switch to breathy voice might happen even earlier if the utterance has a long low-pitched stretch corresponding to a L- phrase accent. Or, a speaker might break into creaky voice in such a region. In fact, many speakers break into creaky voice in almost any region with very low fundamental frequency. Since creaky voice is typically characterized by very irregular glottal periods (i.e., the fundamental frequency is physically not well-defined), pitch-tracking algorithms often do not do well during these portions of the utterance, creating a messy `spattering' of values, like that seen in the f0 trace between 4.95 and 5.08 seconds in <<jam2>>. Here the creak is due to the L*.
EXAMPLE <<jam2>>: Will you have marmalade, or jam? L* H- L* H-H%
The pitch tracker can also completely fail, and give no f0 values at all, as in the region of the L- in the second production of <<made1>> after about 3.4s.
EXAMPLE <<made1>>: Marianna made the marmalade. second production 2) L+H* L-L%
In these two examples (as in many other occurrences of the same tone types in many of the example utterances in this labelling guide), the creaky voice is reliably interpreted by native speakers as a very low pitch value for some low tone. However, creaky voice does not automatically mean a very low L tone. Creaky voice can also occur as one common manifestation of a glottal stop, a segment which in English often occurs phonetically as a way to set off a word beginning with a stressed syllable that has no onset consonant. For example, the word "airline" in <<glottal-stop>> begins phonetically with a glottal stop realized as creaky voice.
EXAMPLE <<glottal-stop>>: And set training and experience standards H* H* H- H* H* L-L% for airline inspectors and mechanics. H* H* L- H* L-L%
Nor are breathy voice and creaky voice the only source of pitch-tracking errors. Even in parts of the utterance with normal modal voicing, pitch-tracking algorithms can sometimes go wrong because of fluctuations of amplitude or because of the vowel's resonance characteristics. A perfectly ordinary period-to-period oscillation in amplitude can cause a halving of the estimated fundamental frequency value, as illustrated in the region between 4.8 and 4.93 seconds and again between 5.3 and 5.45 seconds in example utterance <<pitch-halving>>. (Compare this to <<no-pitch-halving>>, which is exactly the same utterance, pitch-tracked with somewhat different assumptions about the signal parameters which the pitch-tracking program uses in its consistency-checking algorithm.) Or, if the first formant is much higher than the fundamental, the pitch tracking program might take the amplitude of harmonics that it amplifies as an intervening glottal pulse, effectively doubling the pitch, as in the region between 14.07 and 14.18 seconds in example utterance <<pitch-doubling>>. Transcribers must therefore learn when to trust their ears to catch such misparsings in the fundamental frequency track (or to use an alternate record of the fundamental frequency contour, such as the narrow-band spectrogram). When all of these perturbing effects are taken into account, however, the fundamental frequency contour becomes a valuable aid in transcribing the events on the tone tier.
EXAMPLE <<pitch-halving>>: Jim builds a big daisy-chain. H* H* L-L%EXAMPLE <<no-pitch-halving>>: Jim builds a big daisy-chain. H* H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<pitch-doubling>>: Then I don't know if I can explain H* L+H* it to you. L-L%
Some familiar contours, and the contrast between H* and L+H*
The productions in <<made1>> and the first two productions in <<made3>> also illustrate one of the more difficult contrasts in pitch accent type -- that between the two types of `peak accent' in which the peak is timed to occur on the accented syllable (H* versus L+H*). These two pitch accents are alike in that both have high fundamental frequency targets timed to occur on the accented syllable. They are alike also in that the actual timing of the f0 peak that realizes the high tone can vary depending on the phonetic length of the syllable and on the neighboring tones. In longer syllables just before a L- phrase accent, the peak tends to come fairly early in the syllable, whereas in short syllables with no immediately following tone target, the peak for the high tone can be quite late, sometimes after the actual acoustic end of the syllable. This is illustrated in the hat pattern utterance in <<word1>>. The peak for the high tone of the first H* on "word" comes rather late (in the last third of the syllable), whereas the peak for the high tone of the second H* comes very early in "word" before the L- low tone target (during the first quarter of the syllable). How then do the two pitch accents differ?
EXAMPLE <<word1>>: Your word is your word. H* H* L-L%
The essential difference is what happens before the high tone. The leading L tone in L+H* is meant to transcribe a rise from a fundamental frequency value low in the pitch range that cannot be attributed to a L* pitch accent on the preceding syllable or to a L- phrase accent or L% boundary tone at a preceding intermediate-phrase or intonation-phrase boundary. For H*, by contrast, there is at most a small rise from the middle of the speaker's voice range (unless, of course, the H* follows soon after some low tone such as a L* pitch accent or L- phrase accent). Example utterance <<won>> is a minimal pair illustrating this contrast.
EXAMPLE <<won>>: Marianna won it. in two productions 1) H* L- L% 2) L+H* L- L%
In the English intonation system as described by Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg (1990), H* and L+H* have distinct meanings, which make the latter more likely to occur in a contrastive context such as the one evoked by the second production of the sentence in <<made1>>. In theory, this contrast between H* and L+H* can occur anywhere within a phrase. However, the distinction is difficult to make when the accented syllable is the first in the utterance, as in the second production of the sentence in <<anna>>. These three productions are examples of almost exactly the same patterns as exemplified by the three productions in <<made1>>. However, because the word "Anna" has no unstressed syllables before the main stressed one, it is difficult to realize the low tone for the nuclear accent on the first word in the second production. In cases such as this, where the evidence for L+H* comes from (theory-dependent) intuitions about meaning rather than from any clear low pitched region in the fundamental frequency contour, the ToBI Annotation Conventions prescribe H* instead. (The *? on the "married" in the first production illustrates a very common type of ambiguity about accent placement that is discussed below in Section 2.9.)
EXAMPLE <<anna>>: Anna married Lenny. in three productions 1) H* *? H* L-L% 2) H* L-L% 3) H* L-H% L+H* L-L%
Even when there is a long enough stretch between the beginning of the utterance and the accent, L+H* can be difficult to distinguish from H* because the categorical distinction in meaning is not always matched by a categorical distinction in the f0 level of the low tone. (The mapping of phonetic continua onto discrete oppositions is a well-known problem in segmental phonology as well.) Utterance <<made2>> above illustrates this. The L tone of the L+H* in the third production is not so low as that in the second production. When such utterances are taken out of context, it is possible for even intonational experts to be confused, and in fact, another transcriber with long experience in transcribing English pitch accents questioned our transcription of this as L+H*. (We are confident in the transcription, and did not mark it as X*? -- see Section 2.9 below -- but only because we know the context.)
The last productions in <<made1>> and <<anna>> are very similar to another type of contour where one needs to be especially careful in choosing between H* and L+H*. In both of these sentences, the nuclear stress for the second intonation phrase occurs late enough that the low-pitched region of the L+H* (nuclear) pitch accent could be distinguished even if there were no H% boundary tone intervening between the L+H* pitch accent and the L- phrase accent for the preceding phrase. In the very similar contours of example utterances <<noone>> and <<for-marianna>>, on the other hand, there is no H% boundary tone, and one must play close attention to the timing in order to decide whether the accent in the second phrase should be transcribed as H* or L+H*. (Note that the first utterance in <<for-marianna>> also probably illustrates grouping at the level of the intermediate phrase and not a full intonation phrase; see Section 2.4 for the difficulty of telling these levels apart in this context).
EXAMPLE <<noone>>: But Marianna knows noone. L+H* L-L% L+H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<for-marianna>>: 1) That one's for Marianna. H* L- L+H* L-L% 2) Give me the brown one for Marianna. H* H* L-L% H* L-L%
The first response alternative in example utterance <<mother4>> illustrates another idiomatic intonation contour which might be confused with L+H*. This is the `surprise-redundancy' contour described by Sag & Liberman (1975). Here the preceding low pitched region comes from a L* pitch accent on a prenuclear accented word. The second response alternative shows the subtle way in which this rising sequence differs from L+H*. The simple interpolation from the L* to the H* is more gradual than the steep rise within the L+H* accent, although the difference can be very subtle when there are only a few syllables between the two accents in the L* H* sequence, as it is here.
EXAMPLE <<mother4>>: Who's it for? Mary's mother. It's for Mary's mother. L* H* L-L% L* H* L-L% *? L+H* L-L%
******************************************************************** PRACTICE ONE -- H* versus L+H*, L* H* L- L%, L* H- H%, and other accents in familiar contours ******************************************************************** Transcribe these exercises using the exercises script. _______________________________________________________________________ EASY: EXERCISE <<amelia-p2>>: Amelia. (two productions) EXERCISE <<mother1>>: Marianna's mother. EXERCISE <<mole1>>: A new mole. EXERCISE <<anna1>>: Anna married Lenny. [Compare to last production in <<anna>>] EXERCISE <<thought>>: That's what I thought. EXERCISE <<lazy>>: He's lazy and crazy and stupid. _______________________________________________________________________ INTERMEDIATE: EXERCISE <<memphis1>>: Are you going to visit your mother when you're in Nashville? EXERCISE <<memphis2>>: My mother lives in Memphis. EXERCISE <<heavy-rain>>: Heavy rain possible. High around 70. [Transcribe only the second sentence for now, concentrating on the "seventy".] EXERCISE <<wellies1>>: Are you gonna wear your wellingtons? [Concentrate on the nuclear accent and following tones. (We know that there must be a prenuclear accent of the same type as the nuclear one, but we're not sure where it is.)] EXERCISE <<eileen-leaving>>: Eileen is leaving. (two productions) EXERCISE <<tree1house>>: My classmate who lives in a treehouse was written up in Atlantic. _______________________________________________________________________ DIFFICULT: EXERCISE <<dream>>: So, what did you dream? [Don't worry about the tune on "So" for now.] EXERCISE <<thermometer>>: Keep the thermometer under your tongue. [Transcribe only the "under your tongue" for now.] EXERCISE <<fail1>>: So, a lotta times they fail. [Concentrate on transcribing the pitch accents here, and don't worry about transcribing the "So".] EXERCISE <<happens>>: And what happens is, when you... [Concentrate only on the first clause (before "when").] EXERCISE <<I-mean>>: You know what I mean? EXERCISE <<anyway>>: But anyway, if you can't see that then I don't know if I can explain it to you. [Note that the f0 tracker has doubled the pitch on the word "can", and that your transcription of the tones nearby should take this into account.]
The timing of the phrase accent and "upstep"
EXAMPLE <<names>>: Anna may know my name, and yours too. Anna may know our names? H* L-H% H* H* L-L% L* H-H%
(Some experienced transcribers may want to call the pitch accent on "Anna" in the first sentence a L+H*. We remind them of the annotation guidelines that say in effect "Whenever there might be any doubt whatsoever, such as on the absolute utterance initial syllable, choose H* rather than L+H*.")
The summary statement on ToBI conventions prescribes that, in a waves(tm) label file, the phrase accent (or phrase accent and following boundary tone) should be marked at a point at or just before the end of the last segment in the word ending the intermediate phrase (or full intonational phrase) and always before the related break-index mark. The conventions say that the phrase accent should be placed here even when the nuclear accent occurs quite early and the phrase tone is realized over a long period of time, as in these two example utterances.
Note that when the nuclear accent is close to the end of the intonation phrase, it is impossible to discern any inflection point between the high f0 target for the H- phrase accent and the even higher f0 target for the upstepped H% boundary tone. The upstepped boundary tone after "jam" in example utterance <<jam1>> illustrated the smooth single rise that results in this case.
Example utterance <<money>> illustrates the full paradigm of combinations of phrase accent and following boundary tone that can occur at the end of an intonation phrase. Note that because of the upstep of the pitch range after the H- phrase accent, the L% boundary tone of a H- L% sequence does not have an absolutely low f0 target, just a lower one than that of the upstepped H% boundary tone. The contrast between a H- L% and a H- H% sequence is particularly salient when the preceding nuclear pitch accent is H*, as in the two sentences in example utterance <<name1>>.
EXAMPLE <<money>>: 1) Is that Marianna's money? H* H* L-H% 2) That's Marianna's money. H* L-L% 3) That's Marianna's money. H* H-L% 4) Is that Marianna's money? L* L* H-H%
EXAMPLE <<name1>>: My name is Marianna. in two productions 1) H* H-H% 2) H* H-L%
The productions in <<money>> of the two combinations with final L% boundary tone illustrate another potential difficulty, and highlight the importance of listening to the speech and not just looking at the f0 record when doing the intonational analysis for the tone tier transcription. When an intonation phrase is not the last one in an uninterrupted stretch of speech and it ends with a L% boundary tone, it is difficult to distinguish from an intermediate phrase ending with the corresponding phrase accent just by examining the f0 contour. That is, the pitch differences between L- L% sequence and a mere L-, or between a H- L% sequence and a mere H-, are very subtle at best. Here the transcriber must rely on the subjective sense of degree of disjuncture, which is probably cued by such other things as the amount of preboundary lengthening or the degree of final lowering in the case of L- L% versus L-. (Note that the difference here must be transcribed also on the break index tier -- Section 3.) Example utterances <<park2>> and <<oregano>> illustrate this difficulty. In <<park2>>, looking just at the f0 contour, we might have L- L% and a full intonation phrase boundary or just L- and a mere intermediate phrase boundary between the nuclear H* pitch accents on "probably" and "pleasantest". The ambiguous durational cues (two experienced transcribers argued even over whether the boundary should be before or after the "the") supports the notion that this must be the latter, a mere intermediate phrase boundary. By contrast, the strong sense of pause (caused by the lengthening on "and"?) in the tonally identical stretch between the accents on "shortest" and "probably" support a full intonation phrase. In <<oregano>> the two productions contrast the L* H- intermediate phrases typical of a list in the first production with the ambiguous H* H- or H* H- L% plateaus of the second.
EXAMPLE <<park2>>: Definitely the shortest and probably the pleasantest H* L- H* L-L% H* L- H* way to go is through the park. L- L+H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<oregano>>: 1) Let's see I need oregano 'n marjoram 'n some H* H* L-L% L* H- L* H- fresh basil okay? L+H* !H* L- H* H-H% 2) Oh I don't know it's got oregano 'n marjoram H* !H* !H* L-L% H* H- H* H- 'n some fresh basil. H* H-L%
The f0 patterns on "oregano" and "marjoram" illustrate also another difference between the H- and L- phrase accent, particularly in the contexts of unlike tones on the preceding nuclear accent -- i.e. in the context of L* H- versus, say, H* L-. When the nuclear accent is on an early syllable in the last word in the phrase, the L- of a H* L- sequence seems to kick in very immediately with a sharp fall that typically begins during or just after the accented syllable. In the analogous situation, the rise from a L* to a H- begins as early, but the f0 change is much more gradual. Here, for example, the f0 seems to be rising continuously from about a third of the way into the accented syllable all the way to the end of the phrase. In this case, there is no real inflection point leveling out into a plateau.
The last clause of the first production in <<oregano>> also
illustrates anew the difficulty mentioned above in connection with
utterance <<mother4>> in Section 2.2. What is the best analysis of
the fall to a low level immediately after "marjoram" and subsequent
rise to a high f0 on "fresh"? How can we distinguish, say, a sequence
of L* H* from the L+H* that we have transcribed? One thing to note is
that, since accented syllables must be stressed, other characteristics
of a syllable must be compatible with a tonal analysis that puts a
pitch accent on it. The words "and" ("'n") and "some" here do not
sound stressed at all. Both have been reduced to the point that they
have syllabic nasals as their nuclei. This supports the analysis of
L+H* on "fresh" over an analysis of L* H*, even though the fall from
"marjoram" looks so much steeper than the gradual rise from "and" back
up to the H tone on "fresh" that the f0 pattern may seem more
compatible with a L* on "and". Note, however, that there may be
mistracking due to breathy voice on "and". Also, the "some" shows a
strong perturbation from the initial voiceless [s] that obscures how
low the intended f0 is later in the syllable.
Difficult combinations of nuclear pitch accent and following
phrase accent
The combination of L* and following L- is also not rare. There are two situations where this sequence is typically encountered. The first is illustrated in <<nose>>, and the first sentence in <<tags>>. This L* L- H% pattern is typical of such vocative tags. The second sentence in <<tags>> shows that tag questions can have this contour too. However, tag questions can also take a H* L- L% intonation pattern (the third sentence in <<tags>>), which seems to be precluded on the vocative tag for pragmatic reasons (see Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986).
(Section 2.8 will explain the `!' diacritic in the second pitch accent, and Section 2.9 will explain the X*? accent on "Oh".)
EXAMPLE <<nose>>: Oh don't nuzzle me you marmalade-nose. X*? L- H* !H* L- L* L-H%
EXAMPLE <<tags>>: 1) Where are you going, Willy? H* L- L* L-H% 2) He won't be going, will he? H* H* L- L* L-H% 3) He won't be going, will he? H* H* L- H* L-L%
The f0 contour for the L* L- H% vocative tag contour can be confused with a longish postnuclear stretch in the sequence H* L- L%, as shown in example utterance <<vocative1>>. As with medial L- intermediate phrase boundary versus L- L% intonation phrase boundary discussed above, the transcriber may have to rely entirely on the subjective impression of greater versus lesser disjuncture to capture this difference between an intermediate phrase boundary at a vocative tag and no boundary. (Note again that the difference here must be accompanied by different symbols on the break index tier.)
EXAMPLE <<vocative1>>: 1) Anna will win, Manny. H* L- L* L-H% 2) Anna will win Manny. (She won't lose him). H* H* L-L%
The other situation in which one often sees a L* nuclear accent and following L- phrase accent is in the `contradiction contour', an intonational idiom illustrated in <<gloria>> and <<elephant3>>. This contour is discussed at length in Sag & Liberman (1975) and chapter 3 of Ladd (1980). The L* L- H% sequence starting at the nuclear syllable is like the contour in the vocative tag, but this is not the only essential component of this intonational idiom. Crucially, there must be a fall from an early prenuclear H* pitch accent (or from an initial %H boundary tone -- see next section) onto a nearby L* accent. If the L* nuclear accented syllable is far from the beginning of the utterance (as is the case with the nuclear accent on "incurable" in <<elephant3>>), there might be another L* on some prenuclear syllable with relatively prominent secondary stress (e.g., the fourth syllable of "elephantiasis" in <<elephant3>>). Note that <<elephant3>> also illustrates the possibility of having two pitch accents on one word when there is more than one full stressed syllable (see Section 2.9 for more examples).
EXAMPLE <<gloria>>: Ah Gloria you're not ugly. H* L* L-L% H* L* L-H%
EXAMPLE <<elephant3>>: Elephantiasis isn't incurable. H* L* L* L-H%
The initial %H boundary tone
EXAMPLE <<bananas>>: Bananas aren't poisonous. %H L* L* L-H%
In the intonational analysis assumed in the ToBI system, the final boundary tone is mandatory, whereas an initial one is not. The initial boundary tone differs from the final ones also in that it seems to be limited to absolute utterance-initial position, and in that it is always high. Thus, unlike the final boundary, where there is a paradigmatic choice between L% and H%, the phrase-initial boundary tone contrasts merely with the absence of a boundary tone. That is, %H contrasts with the default (unmarked) initial pattern, which in absolute utterance-initial position tends to start in the middle part of the speaker's pitch range (as opposed to beginning of utterance-medial intonation phrases, where the pitch simply continues from the value at which the previous phrase ended). This utterance-initial midrange pitch value is illustrated in <<loan1>>, where the first and second productions show a rise from the mid value to H* and a fall from the same default mid value to L*, respectively. The third production then contrasts with the second in that it has an initial %H boundary tone. These two examples also illustrate the typical effect of having an initial %H boundary tone in the surprise-redundancy contour. The one with the initial %H has a greater vividness, conveying either more surprise or more insistence that this is the information that the hearer should really already know.
EXAMPLE <<loan1>>: You need a loan. In three productions 1) H* H* L-L% 2) L* H* L-L% 3) %H L* H* L-L%
The ToBI conventions prescribe that %H be an analysis of last resort. That is, like L+H*, which is used instead of H* only when there is no other possible explanation for the low pitch before the peak (see Section 2.2, above), %H is used only when no other plausible explanation for an initial high pitch. It should be marked only when a high-pitched beginning for an utterance cannot be attributed to a H* accent on the first few syllables in the utterance -- i.e., when the first word itself does not appear to be accented or when its accented syllable occurs too far into the word to account for the initial high target. Thus it should not be used in <<gloria>>, where the high pitch at the beginning of the phrase "You're not ugly" is attributed to a H* accent on the first syllable "You're". In <<elephant3>>, similarly, although the main stress of the word "elephantiasis" clearly is at the L* accent on the fourth syllable, we have the option of analyzing the earlier high pitch as another pitch accent earlier in the word, since the first syllable has a lexical `secondary stress' (i.e. is rhythmically more prominent than the surrounding syllables).
The following examples are practice utterances for the phrase accent and boundary tone contrasts discussed in the last few sections. Transcribe these exercises using the exercises script. _______________________________________________________________________ EASY: EXERCISE <<manitowoc>>: Does Manitowoc have a bowling alley? EXERCISE <<mother2>>: For Marianna's mother. EXERCISE <<cream>>: Would you like some cream? EXERCISE <<wellies2>>: No, I think I'll wear my hiking boots. [Don't worry about transcribing the tune on "No" for now.] EXERCISE <<voice>>: You lost your voice. EXERCISE <<flour2>>: Oh nothing special, you know flour and butter and sugar. [Transcribe just the second part, after the "you know".] EXERCISE <<audience1>>: Good evening radio audience. [Don't worry about the transcription of "radio".] EXERCISE <<good2>>: I thought it was good. EXERCISE <<legumes1>>: Legumes are a good source of vitamins, and of protein as well. EXERCISE <<legumes2>>: Legumes are a good source of vitamins, but not the best. [Transcribe only the first part, up through "vitamins".] EXERCISE <<legumes3>>: Legumes are a good source of vitamins, and so are greens. [Transcribe only the first part, up through "vitamins".] EXERCISE <<stalin>>: I was wrong, and Stalin was right. I was wrong. _______________________________________________________________________ INTERMEDIATE: EXERCISE <<friend1>>: A friend of mine um works for NASA. EXERCISE <<good1>>: I thought it was good? [Play <<good2>> for contrast.] EXERCISE <<pigs>>: They've eaten the pigs. (two productions) EXERCISE <<flour1>>: I need flour and sugar and butter and oh I don't know. [Transcribe only the part up through "butter" for now.] EXERCISE <<atlanta>>: Yes I would uh like the information on the flight leaving from uh Philadelphia to Atlanta. [Concentrate just on the parts "like the information" and "Philadelphia to Atlanta".] EXERCISE <<good-aft>>: Good afternoon. Information Services. EXERCISE <<knock-stuff>>: Mostly they just sat around and knocked stuff. You know, the school, other people. [Concentrate for now on the second sentence, starting at "You know..."] EXERCISE <<drive>>: I'm not going to drive to school today. EXERCISE <<spoon1>>: There's a spoon in here. _______________________________________________________________________ DIFFICULT: EXERCISE <<mother3>>: I've told you a million times! It's for Mary's mother. [Compare <<mother4>>; don't agonize too much over the tones around "for" in the second sentence.] EXERCISE <<experience1>>: Well I mean, would you hire somebody that doesn't have no experience? EXERCISE <<trafficlight>>: That's right at the traffic light. (two productions)
*********************************************************** PRACTICE TWO -- phrase accent and boundary tone contrasts ***********************************************************
Pitch accent timing, and the L*+H pitch accent
There is another difference in the timing of apparent peak accents, however, that must not be ignored, because it is distinctive. Both the small rise from mid pitch that is usually seen with an utterance-initial H* accent and the definitive rise from low pitch that is necessarily seen to transcribe a L+H* accent contrast phonologically with another accent type that involves a rise from low pitch into a peak that occurs much later, making the low tone align with the accented syllable. This is the `scooped' accent L*+H, illustrated in the first production of <<millionaire>>. The second production in this example utterance is of the contrasting `rising peak' accent L+H*. These two pitch accents have very different meanings, as described by Ladd (1980) and Ward & Hirschberg (1985), and the difference in timing here is a phonological difference that is represented in the ToBI system by the contrasting specifications of L*+H versus L+H*. That is, phonologically, both of these accents are a L plus a H, but in the `scooped' accent, the L is the starred tone (associated to the accented syllable) rather than the H. The associated phonetic difference is that the rise is much later in the `scooped' accent, and it is the timing of the minimum f0 relative to the segments of the associated syllable that is salient.
EXAMPLE <<millionaire>>: Only a millionaire. in two productions 1) H* L*+H L-H% 2) H* L+H* L-H%
Because it is the L target in the `scooped' accent that is associated to the stressed syllable, and not the H, the high pitch target is specified only as occurring somewhat later than the L, and the timing of the peak f0 relative to the segments is not controlled. If the stressed syllable is long, the rise to the peak might be accomplished entirely within the accented syllable. But if the stressed syllable is short, the peak may occur one or more syllables later. This is illustrated in example utterance <<stein>>, which shows a relatively fixed rise relative to the low f0, which makes the peak occur within the last part of the long syllable "Stein" but two syllables later relative to the short accented first syllable in "rigamarole".
EXAMPLE <<stein>>: Stein's not a bad man. L*+H L-H% Rigamarole is monomorphemic. L*+H L-H%
Note that although the crucial difference between L+H* and L*+H is the timing of the low pitched portion, some speakers produce a secondary difference, whereby the L of L*+H is consistently somewhat lower in the pitch than the L of L+H*. This is particularly apparent in the first accents of the two productions in <<bloomingdales>>. This also means that L*+H is not nearly so confusable with H* as is L+H*. There is also considerable interspeaker differences. Some speakers have rather mid-level L tones even in L*+H. (This fact will be relevant when you transcribe <<noodle1>> and <<noodle2>> in PRACTICE THREE.) Other speakers have very low L tones even in L+H*. This does not affect the relative heights of the L's in L*+H versus L+H*.
EXAMPLE <<bloomingdales>>: There's a lovely one in Bloomingdale's. in two productions: 1) L*+H L*+!H L-H% 2) L+H* L+!H* L-L%
Another thing to note in the sequence of accents in these two productions is the introduction of another set of symbols for the second (the nuclear) accents. These new symbols are actually the same accent types as the first accent in their respective utterances. The extra `!' in the symbols for the nuclear accents is a diacritic to denote the way in which the second accent peak is lower than the preceding peak. This lowering of the second peak is due to a process called `downstep', which is defined as a categorical compression of the pitch range that reduces the f0 targets for any H tones subsequent to the specification of the downstep -- i.e. the counterpart of the `upstep' triggered by the H-. We will describe downstep and what triggers it in more detail in Section 2.8 below after introducing the last remaining pitch accent type in the ToBI analysis, transcribed as H+!H*.
Finally, as in deciding how low the f0 must be to count as L+H* rather than H*, transcribers should be aware of slight interspeaker differences in the timing of the L tone in differentiating L+H* from L*+H. Our impression is that American speakers (such as the speaker of <<bloomingdales>> do not always make L*+H rise as late as most RP British speakers do. The second (downstepped) L*+!H on the word "Bloomingdale's" in the first production, in particular, might seem quite early to a British transcriber. Note, however, that there is a very low pitch level throughout the [b] and the [l], and the f0 does not begin to rise until the voicing begins in the [u], making the peak occur considerably after the [m] release. This is quite late for a nuclear L+H* before a L- (cf. our comments above in Section 2.2.), as can be seen by comparing this rise to the rise in the comparably downstepped nuclear L+H* in the second production. In the second production, the rise begins before the [b] and is completed well before the release of the [m].
The H+!H* pitch accent
EXAMPLE <<theresa>>: You want an example? How about Mother Theresa? H* H* H-H% H* *? H* L-L% You want an example? Mother Theresa. H* H* H-H% H+!H* L-L% A HREF="AU/theresa.au">
(The *? in the first production indicates uncertainty about whether that word is accented -- see Section 2.9.)
Downstep
In the ToBI system, this compression of the pitch range is marked by having alternative names for accents which are used for the first downstepped high tone target after the downstep trigger. Thus in the first production in example utterance <<bloomingdales>>, the second `scooped' accent is transcribed with L*+!H rather than L*+H to denote that a downstep has occurred. And similarly in the second production in this example utterance, the second `rising peak' accent is transcribed with L+!H* rather than L+H*. When there are more than two such bitonal accents in a row, each accent triggers another instance of downstep, so that each subsequent accent peak is reduced yet again relative to the immediately preceding one. This is illustrated in example utterance <<yellow2>>. Example utterance <<calling>> shows that it is not just pitch accents which are affected by downstep. The !H- phrase accent here is reduced to a mid level by the downstep triggered by the preceding L+H* nuclear pitch accent. (Note the characteristic mid-tone tail, as the downstepped !H- phrase accent triggers a subsequent upstep of the L% boundary tone.)
EXAMPLE <<yellow2>>: There's a lovely yellowish old one. H* L+H* L+!H* L+!H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<calling>>: Marianna. L+H* !H-L%
Transcribers who are familiar with Pierrehumbert's system will recognize that ToBI differs in this explicit marking of the reduced pitch range directly on the first H tone affected by the downstep. In Pierrehumbert's system, downstep is not explicitly marked because it is redundant to the specification of the trigger in the preceding bitonal accent.
Pierrehumbert's system differs from ToBI in yet another way; it includes a sixth pitch accent type, H*+L, which bears the same relationship to H+L* (ToBI's H+!H*) as L*+H does to L+H*. That is, the fall to a slightly lower pitch target occurs after the accented syllable instead of into the accented syllable. Typically, the endpoint of this fall is no lower than the pitch target of a subsequent downstepped H tone, and the contrast between H* and H*+L thus hinges on recognizing the downstep triggered by the H*+L.
Many first time transcribers find this comparatively abstract analysis unintuitive and therefore difficult. In the ToBI system, therefore, we have eliminated H*+L in favor of marking the downstep directly on the first reduced H tone. Thus H* in ToBI corresponds to both plain H* and the downstep triggering H*+L. Users of databases transcribed with the ToBI system who need to analyze the data in terms of the intonational categories in Pierrehumbert's system, can recover each H*+L tone by searching for a downstepped !H* or !H- marked immediately after a H* (or !H*) accent. For example, in utterance <<really1>> the second production is a plain `hat pattern' (H* H* L- L%) whereas the first is a `downstepped hat', which would be transcribed as H*+L H* L- L% in Pierrehumbert's system. The second production in utterance <<calling2>> illustrates another very familiar intonation pattern, the `calling contour', which in Pierrehumbert's system would be transcribed with H*+L H- L%.
EXAMPLE <<really1>>: That's really illuminating. in three productions 1) H* !H* L-L% 2) H* H* L-L% 3) Transcribe this one in PRACTICE THREE
EXAMPLE <<calling2>>: Anna. in two productions 1) L* H-H% 2) H* !H-L%
A fact to note about downstep is that it is local to an intermediate phrase. Each new intermediate phrase represents a new paradigmatic choice of pitch range, at which downstep can be reset. This is illustrated in <<yellow3>>, where the intermediate phrase boundary after the "yellowish" allows a new choice of pitch range, so that the peak on "old" is not downstepped relative to that on "yellowish", unlike in <<yellow2>>. (See Section 2.9 to read about the X*? symbol marking the peak on "old". It indicates that there is an accent on "old" but we are not completely certain which type of accent it is. It could be simply H* after an unexpectedly steep rise from the preceding L-. Or it could be L+H*, with a less steep rise than expected.)
EXAMPLE <<yellow3>>: It's lovely and yellowish, and it's an old one. L+H* L+!H* L- X*? L-L%
Note, however, that the peak on "yellowish" looks downstepped relative to that on "lovely". This is due to the relationship between the pitch ranges chosen for the two intermediate phrases. The topic structure of a discourse is marked in part by the choice of pitch range for the succession of intermediate phrases; large topics begin with expanded pitch range and end with very reduced pitch range (see, e.g., Brown, Curie, & Kenworthy, 1980; Hirschberg & Pierrehumbert, 1986). This often creates an effect of `paragraph intonation' in which the relationship among successive phrasal pitch ranges mimics the phrase-internal relationship between preceding peaks and subsequent following lower downstepped peaks. The successive pitch ranges in utterances <<park1>> through <<park5>> in PRACTICE TWO above illustrate `paragraph intonation' over a longer time frame.
Sometimes it is not easy to tell the difference between two phrase-internal accents with the second downstepped relative to the first and two intermediate phrases with the second phrase in a lower pitch range relative to the first. Example utterance <<levels>> illustrates such a difficult case.
EXAMPLE <<levels>>: There are many intermediate levels. L+H* L+!H* L+!H* L-L%
******************************************* PRACTICE THREE -- L*+H, H+!H*, and downstep ******************************************* Transcribe these exercises using the exercises script. _______________________________________________________________________ EASY: EXERCISE <<yellow1>>: There's a lovely yellowish old one. [Compare to <<yellow3>>.] EXERCISE <<really1>>: That's really illuminating. [Transcribe third production now; first two are examples from 2.8.] EXERCISE <<eileen1>>: Eileen's pro-English. EXERCISE <<eileen2>>: Eileen's pro-English. [Compare to <<eileen1>>.] EXERCISE <<calling3>>: Marianna. (two productions) EXERCISE <<windy>>: Becoming windy. EXERCISE <<park1>>: Okay to get from home to the station. EXERCISE <<park4>>: But uh in fact I have to go along the main road for a little ways it's probably about three hundred yards. EXERCISE <<legumes2>>: Legumes are a good source of vitamins, but not the best. [Repeated exercise from PRACTICE TWO. Now transcribe the second part, after "vitamins".] _______________________________________________________________________ INTERMEDIATE: EXERCISE <<friend2>>: A friend of mine works for NASA. [Compare to <<friend1>>.] EXERCISE <<mile>>: You give him an inch, he takes a mile. EXERCISE <<really2>>: That's really illuminating. (three productions) EXERCISE <<park3>>: It would be nice to be able to go right out the back door and into the park cause it's actually right behind the house. EXERCISE <<flour1>>: I need flour and sugar and butter and oh I don't know. [Repeated exercise from PRACTICE TWO. Transcribe only the part after "butter".] EXERCISE <<sununu>>: ... and denies speculation that Chief of Staff, John Sununu, is meddling in the region's environmental affairs. EXERCISE <<noodle1>>: We have a lean mini-noodle with beans. Well, we have a lean mini-noodle dish. EXERCISE <<noodle2>>: We have a lean mini-noodle with beans. We have a lean mini-noodle dish. EXERCISE <<romanelli>>: John Romanelli, John Romanelli, please return to the ticket counter. EXERCISE <<thatone>>: Do you really think it's that one? (two productions) EXERCISE <<word>>: Your word is your word. [Compare to <<word1>>.] _______________________________________________________________________ DIFFICULT: EXERCISE <<thatone2>>: Do you really think it's that one? (two more productions) [Don't agonize too much over the tones around "Do you" in the second production.] EXERCISE <<heavy-rain>>: Heavy rain possible. High around 70. [Repeated exercise from PRACTICE ONE. Transcribe the first sentence now, concentrating on the "rain".] EXERCISE <<tree2house>>: My classmate who lives in a treehouse was written up in Atlantic. [Compare <<tree1house>> in PRACTICE ONE.] EXERCISE <<knock-stuff>>: Mostly they just sat around and knocked stuff. You know, the school, other people. [Repeated exercise from PRACTICE TWO. Concentrate now on the first sentence, the part before "You know..."] EXERCISE <<argument>>: If he can then there's no argument about it. (two productions) EXERCISE <<sublime1>>: Sublime mnemonic rhyme and free meter. EXERCISE <<sublime2>>: Sublime mnemonic rhyme and free meter. EXERCISE <<fail>>: And what happens is: when you... when you buy my business, and you try to run my business, it's really hard for you to run my business. So a lotta times they fail. [Concentrate particularly on the "When you buy my business", and don't worry about the preceding interrupted "when you..."] EXERCISE <<business>>: A lot of people have done this; they sell their business, and they have... If something goes wrong, and they have the first rights to buy it back. [Interviewer: Oh, really?] [You've already transcribed parts of this in earlier practice sets. Here concentrate on filling in the missing pieces up through "something goes wrong", leaving for now the "and they have..."]
Uncertainty about accent placement and accent type
EXAMPLE <<capote>>: Capote died Saturday at the Bellaire home of L+H* !H* L- H* H* L+H* L- Joanne Carson (estranged wife of talkshow host L+H* L-L% L+H* L- H* *? Johnny Carson), and she was among those who H* L-L% L+H* !H* !H* eulogised him. H+!H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<onions>>: Okay now chop the onions... Now be careful. H* L- H* H+!H* H- L* L+H* L-H% Okay, chop the onions, and put them into that bowl. L+H* L-L% H+!H* H- H* H+!H* L-L%
Because speakers can vary their pitch ranges seemingly without limit to convey discourse organization or degree of involvement, and because downstep can happen many times within a single phrase, sometimes it is difficult to tell whether a tone is H or L, even when one is sure a tone is there. The accents on "smoke" and "yeah" in the asides in example utterance <<smoke>> illustrates this. Or, in very reduced pitch ranges, it can be difficult to tell whether a syllable is accented or not. Utterance <<sold3>> illustrates this. In the very reduced pitch range after the second downstep on "else", it is impossible to know how many accents there are.
EXAMPLE <<smoke>>: Can I smoke? <<interviewer says "You can smoke.">> X*? H-H% Yeah? <<interviewer: "Does this door have to stay open?" If it>> No, it doesn't have to be; you can close it. EXAMPLE <<sold3>>: He sold it to somebody else, they bought the H* !H* !H* *? whole company, and he made lots of money on *? -X? *? *? the business... H* L-L%
In the first type of uncertainty, ToBI prescribes that the transcriber use the notation X*? to simply mark the clear presence of an accent, without forcing an arbitrary commitment to the accent's type. Thus, the accent on "smoke" should be transcribed as X*? rather than as L* or H*. (X*? should not be used to mark uncertainty between the L- and H- phrase accents or between the L% and H% boundary tones. There the transcriber should instead mark X-? for the phrase tones and X%? for the boundary tones.) In the second type of uncertainty, when the transcriber is not certain even that there is a pitch accent (as, for example, on the "bought" in utterance <<sold3>>), the mark *? should be used instead of X*?.
In addition to very compressed pitch ranges, there are several particular tone sequences which are prone to inducing uncertainty about the presence of accent. One such case is the downstepped H* !H* !H* ... sequence just illustrated. In many cases, words after the first H* in such sequences are ambiguous between being accented with !H* and being `deaccented' (i.e. being in the postnuclear low stretch in a H* L- L% sequence). This is not always ambiguous, however. Utterance <<anna2>> illustrates a clear contrast between downstepped and deaccented.
EXAMPLE <<anna2>>: Anna married Lenny. in two productions 1) H* L-L% 2) H* !H* !H* L-L%
Another case of inherently ambiguous tone sequences which occurs very commonly is when there is a long stretch of speech in a `hat pattern' contour. Utterance <<peel>> illustrates this. The word "off" sounds very prominent, giving a strong subjective impression of accent. However, because the word lies in the plateau between the first H* on "peeled" and the nuclear H* pitch accent on "Hawaii", it is difficult to tell whether "off" also bears a H* accent, or just the preceding "peeled". The word "host" in the phrase "talkshow host Johnny Carson" in <<capote>>, the word "married" in the first production of <<anna>>, and the word "Mother" in the first production in <<theresa>> in Section 2.7 above are three more illustrations of this very common ambiguity. The first production in example utterance <<made4>> (given in Section 1.4 above) illustrates the analogous situation with a L*; "Marianna" probably has a L* accent (note the dip down into it from the mid pitch level that begins the sentence) and "marmalade" clearly has a L* accent, but what about the "made" in between?
EXAMPLE <<peel>>: [Ever since the roof of a 19-year old Aloha Airlines Boeing 737] peeled off over Hawaii last April, ... H* *? H* L- H* L-L%
(See example utterance <<older-aircraft>> in the next PRACTICE for the whole context of this phrase.)
In cases such as these it is better to err on the side of conservatism and mark the word with *? or nothing. In particular, the transcriber should take care not to let grammatical expectations guide the marking of accents. If we find ourselves giving in to such thoughts as "This is a content word and therefore probably is accented", we preclude the use of our transcriptions to test whether content words are indeed likely to be accented.
A final source of uncertainty is particularly true of transcribing sentences in isolation extracted from the context in which they originally occurred. This is uncertainty about accent type due to unfamiliarity with a particular speaker's normal speaking range for a particular style of speech. For example in utterance <<hurt>>, the nuclear pitch accent on "hurt" is probably L*; the pitch is lower than the "neutral" value at the beginning of the utterance. However, 200 Hz is very high for a low, and unless one knows from experience that this speaker has a very high-pitched voice, one might be tempted to transcribe this utterance with a H* nuclear accent.
EXAMPLE <<hurt>>: But would it hurt you? *? X*? H-H%
Utterance <<beef>> also illustrates this point. Here we have transcribed each of the accents in the second speaker's response as L*, since we know from many other examples in this labelling guide that this speaker's normal range is higher than the first speaker's voice. This utterance also exemplifies an intonation pattern we have not shown before: a sequence of all low tones, for all of the accents, the phrase accent, and the boundary tone.
EXAMPLE <<beef>>: Here's your Chateaubriand, ma'am. H* L+H* L- L* L-H% I don't eat beef. L* L* L* L-L%
When something is accented that you would not expect
EXAMPLE <<AND1>>: ...design improvements, and a schedule... H* H* L-H% H* L- H* L-L%
EXAMPLE <<hennessy>>: Hennessy is widely respected for his legal H* L- H* !H* L-L% L+H* !H- scholarship and his administrative abilities. H* H- H* *? H* L-L%
Another thing to watch out for is that in very emphatic speech, a word with two fairly strong syllables can bear two pitch accents. Utterance <<understand>> is such a case, where our normal expectation is that only the most stressed final syllable in "understand" will be accented. Here, however, the first syllable is also accented, so that the phrase "to understand" can realize the `surprise-redundancy' contour L* H* L- L%.
EXAMPLE <<understand>>: I'm simply trying to get you to understand. H* L* H- L* H- L* H- L* H* L-L%
Example <<philadelphia>> gives another case of such double accents, apparently without the impetus of realizing any particular intonational idiom.
EXAMPLE <<philadelphia>>: from Philadelphia to Dallas
L+H* !H* L- H* L-L%
This phenomenon of double accents, and the apparently related phenomenon of `stress shift', have been examined extensively by Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and her colleagues (see Ross, Ostendorf, & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1992) in a corpus of newscasts which they have transcribed using something like the ToBI system. Some of the exercises involving this phenomenon are from this study. It is apparently fairly common.
***************************************************************** PRACTICE FOUR -- uncertainty about pitch accent placement or type *****************************************************************Transcribe these exercises using the exercises script. _______________________________________________________________________ EASY: EXERCISE <<legumes3>>: Legumes are a good source of vitamins, and so are greens. [Repeated exercise from PRACTICE TWO. Transcribe the second part, after "vitamins".] EXERCISE <<sold1>>: He sold the business to somebody else EXERCISE <<artwork>>: State law now requires public construction projects to set aside 1% of their budgets for artwork. [Concentrate particularly on the part from "to set aside" on.] EXERCISE <<howto>>: I know we've gotta do it but I don't know how to do it. [There isn't an intermediate phrase break between "how" and "to". You'll learn how to transcribe sequences such as this in Section 3.] EXERCISE <<noodle4>>: Do you have a lean mini-noodle dish? EXERCISE <<noodle5>>: D'you have a lean mini-noodle dish? _______________________________________________________________________ INTERMEDIATE: EXERCISE <<butcher>>: How'd your operation go? Don't talk to me about it; I'd like to strangle the butchers. EXERCISE <<physicist>>: He's a physicist 'n works at NASA. EXERCISE <<environ1>>: And Ballaga seems determined to stay the environmental course. EXERCISE <<environ2>>: plenty of room to flex environmental muscles [We had trouble on the accents around "environmental" too, so don't agonize over their type.] EXERCISE <<older-aircraft>>: Ever since the roof of a 19-year old Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 peeled off over Hawaii last April, sweeping a flight attendant to her death, attention has been focused on the older aircraft. [Don't agonize too much over the "Ever since the roof" part. We found the tonal analysis really hard there too.] _______________________________________________________________________ DIFFICULT: EXERCISE <<spanish>>: And I had registered for Spanish, simply because I'd taken it for five years in high school. EXERCISE <<two-million>>: I'll buy it back from you for like two million, because ya done ran it into the ground, you're having problems, like you... you're not gonna make it, and you go bankrupt, so I'm gonna buy it back from you for like, for next to nothing. EXERCISE <<sold2>>: 'coz he was like, a millionaire [Don't worry about the type of the boundary (if there is one) after "like".] EXERCISE <<massachusetts2>>: Hewlett-Packard has announced it's buying Massachusetts-based Apollo computer.
The point of highest f0
The summary statement in the Annotation Conventions (Appendix A) offers the following advice about HiF0:
-
Transcribers should take reasonable care to choose a point in
time that reflects the target of the H for the accent. In several
cases this will mean choosing some point other than the actual f0
maximum. For example, sometimes the highest f0 value in an
accented syllable reflects the `intrinsic' effect of a voiceless
consonant and will thus be a poor estimate of the speaker's choice
of pitch range. More seriously, in a phrase where the highest
accent-related f0 occurs in a H* H- H% sequence, choosing the
absolutely highest value for HiF0 will artifactually inflate the
pitch range estimate by the amount of the upstep on the H%. In
such cases, we recommend that the syllable's amplitude
contour be used to pinpoint HiF0 within the candidate region.