Compound Stress in English: The Phonetics and Phonology of Prosodic Prominence (Linguistische Arbeiten, 539)

This volume addresses several claims about the two prominence patterns found in English nominal compounds in a rigorously empirical way. Listener proficiency to identify these patterns is investigated, and the acoustic properties that distinguish the patterns are identified. These properties are used to predict statistically the prominence pattern of any given compound. The book further analyzes the semantic and structural factors influencing the distribution of the prominence patterns, and addresses the extent of within- and across-speaker variability in English compound stress assignment. Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Compounds, stress and prominence: concepts and issues 2.1 What is a compound? 2.2 Prominence patterns in compounds 2.3 Prominence in the autosegmental-metrical framework 3 The corpus 4 Perception of compound prominence patterns 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Pretest 4.3 Method 4.3.1 Participants 4.3.2 Stimuli 4.3.3 Procedure 4.4 Results 4.4.1 Overall results 4.4.2 Intrarater reliability 4.4.3 Perception ratings by items 4.4.4 Summary of results 4.5 Discussion 5 Acoustic correlates of compound prominence 5.1 Previous research 5.1.1 Pitch and fundamental frequency 5.1.2 Loudness, intensity and spectral balance 5.1.3 Duration 5.1.4 Non-modal phonation 5.1.5 Summary and research questions 5.2 Material and measurements 5.2.1 Pitch measurements 5.2.2 Duration 5.2.3 Intensity 5.2.4 Spectral balance 5.2.5 Non-modal phonation 5.3 Procedure 5.4 Results 5.5 Discussion 6 Classification and prediction of compound prominence patterns 6.1 Data 6.1.1 Automatic measurement procedure and evaluation 6.1.2 Vowel-intrinsic properties 6.1.3 Summary of acoustic measurements 6.2 Prediction of median prominence ratings 6.2.1 Predictors in the regression analysis 6.2.2 Regression analysis 6.2.3 Predictions for the Boston corpus 6.3 Classification of the Boston corpus 6.3.1 Training set 6.3.2 Model application and evaluation 7 What determines compound prominence patterns? 7.1 Methodology 7.2 Hypothesis testing with unbalanced data 7.3 The structural hypothesis 7.4 The semantic hypothesis 7.5 Structural and semantic hypotheses combined 7.6 Analogical effects 7.7 General discussion 8 Within- and across-speaker variation 8.1 Methodology 8.2 Within-speaker variability 8.2.1 Data 8.2.2 Results 8.2.3 Discussion 8.3 Across-speaker variability 8.3.1 Data 8.3.2 Results 8.3.3 Discussion 8.4 General discussion 9 Conclusion A Introduction to linear regression and mixed-effects models B NOUN + NOUN compounds used in the variability study References

Die Buchreihe Linguistische Arbeiten hat mit über 500 Bänden zur linguistischen Theoriebildung der letzten Jahrzehnte in Deutschland und international wesentlich beigetragen. Die Reihe wird auch weiterhin neue Impulse für die Forschung setzen und die zentrale Einsicht der Sprachwissenschaft präsentieren, dass Fortschritt in der Erforschung der menschlichen Sprachen nur durch die enge Verbindung von empirischen und theoretischen Analysen sowohl diachron wie synchron möglich ist. Daher laden wir hochwertige linguistische Arbeiten aus allen zentralen Teilgebieten der allgemeinen und einzelsprachlichen Linguistik ein, die aktuelle Fragestellungen bearbeiten, neue Daten diskutieren und die Theorieentwicklung vorantreiben.

Main description: While it has long been noted that the first element of most, but not of all English nominal compounds is perceptually most prominent (e.g. TABLE cloth vs. paper CUP), a principled empirical investigation of the acoustics, perception, and the phonological distribution of these two prominence patterns has been missing. Using a corpus of spoken language, the current volume presents the first thorough and detailed investigation of these areas, while also introducing several methodological and statistical innovations to the field The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.