Phonetica was published by Karger Publishers up to and including 2020. If you or your institution subscribed to Phonetica during that period, you might still have access to the full text of this article on the Karger platform if you cannot access it here.
Abstract
This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has notbeen established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end ofthe phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum betweenfalling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR dif-ferwith respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal,and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps.First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the nec-essarybackground information on the phonetics of the contours. In the secondstep, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using theparadigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically gener-atedstimuli on nine semantic scales, such as ‘impolite/polite’. The hypotheses weregenerally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement,while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F inthat it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impolite-ness.The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the additionof a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F0 ; the functional consequence isa reduction of communicated dominance.
verified
© 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel