Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel

Bio: Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Stress (linguistics) & Phrase. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 366 citations.

The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework

Abstract: The ToBI conventions are a consensus system for labelling spoken utterances that segregates tags for different types of phonological events and structures into parallel quasi- independent tiers. Most notably, the conventions specify a way to mark the phonologically contrastive intonational events (Tones) separately from the hierarchy of inter-word junctures (Break-Indices) with which some of these pitch events are associated. The original ToBI conventions are language-specific; they were intended to cover the phonologically contrastive tones of Mainstream American English. However, other annotation conventions based on the same general design principles have now been proposed for several other English varieties and for a number of other languages. This function of the original ToBI system as a general model for developing language-specific annotation conventions makes it possible to compare prosodic systems across languages using a common vocabulary, and to search for universals. This chapter is an overview of the original ToBI system. It reviews the design of the original system and its foundations in basic and applied research. It describes the inter-disciplinary community of users and uses for which the system was intended, and it outlines how the consensus model of American English intonation and inter-word juncture was achieved by finding points of useful intersection among the research interests and knowledge embodied in this community. It thus identifies the practical principles for designing prosodic annotation conventions that emerged in the course of developing, testing, and using this particular system. p. 33 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Figure 2.1. Audio waveform, F0 contour, and MAE_ToBI xlabel windows for utterance Okay... They have a couple flights. p. 34 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Figure 2.2. Audio waveform, F0 contour, and MAE_ToBI xlabel windows for utterance The Pentagon reports fighting in six southern Iraqi cities. p. 35 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Figure 2.3. Audio waveform, F0 contour, and MAE_ToBI xlabel windows for utterance Uhh... Quincy. Could I have the number to uh ... Shore Cab? p. 36 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Notes 1 In accounts by British language teachers and phoneticians before the 1980s, the ‘nucleus’ of an intonation contour was modeled as a holistic dynamic tonal event governing the part of the contour beginning at the most stressed syllable. When this nucleus occurs far from the end of the contour, then, the pitch pattern on material after the nuclear stress is called the ‘tail’. The general shape of the intonation contour over accented syllables before the nucleus is then the ‘head’. 2 Note that there are only four basic break index values, ordered from 0 to 4, with a “hole” at 2. In the original Price et al. (1991) use of break indices, the value 2 represented a perceived boundary strength intermediate between a normal word boundary and a larger phrase boundary, and was used to mark a number of imprecisely-defined phenomena. The ToBI system restricts the use of this label to an explicit subset of these phenomena — namely, inter-word junctures where there is ambiguity between a 1 and a 3 either because there is a phrase tone without the duration lengthening appropriate to a 3, or a lengthening appropriate to a 3 but no phrase tone. This means that ToBI labels do not recognise a prosodic constituent comparable to Selkirk’s (1995) “Minor Phrase” unless this is equated with Beckman and Pierrehumbert’s (1986) tonally marked “intermediate phrase”. Labellers who postulate and perceive a constituent boundary that is larger than a “Prosodic Word” but smaller than the lowest intonationally marked constituent are encouraged to mark these events in a comments tier (see Section 2.5). 3 The break index value ‘0’ was intended to mark a boundary between two orthographic words which is perceived to be considerably reduced in strength from a “normal” word boundary. The MAE_ToBI conventions suggest that this sense of close grouping should be associated with such segmental sandhi phenomena as the flapping of final /t/ in utterances such as Got a dime?, the palatalisation of final /t/ in We sent you the cheque., and so on — i.e., phenomena that have been cited by phonologists as evidence of multi-word prosodic constituents such as the “Prosodic Word” or a “Clitic Group” (see Hayes 1989, Selkirk 1995, Peperkamp 1999, and the references they cite for discussion of different theoretical views of these constituents). A break index value of ‘1’ is then a “normal” word boundary. A more precise definition of these levels is desirable, but not yet feasible, because corpus research on such phenomena as flapping and palatalisation lags considerably behind research on the phonetic correlates of prosodic grouping at the intermediate phrase and intonational phrase level. 4 This meant omitting break indices 5 and 6 from the Price et al. (1991) model, since these two break index values could not be identified with a categorically marked level of prosodic structure such as the intonational phrase. Rather, they were intended to encode the percept of (possibly recursive) higher-level groupings above the intonational phrase. 5 EMU is a set of tools for creating and analyzing speech databases. It includes a powerful search engine that can find segments and events based on their sequential and hierarchical contexts. For example, if a MAE spoken language database has associated word labels, and if those labels are hierarchically organised into intermediate phrases and intonation phrases, with associated MAE_ToBI labels, it is straightforward to query for every instance in the database of a word with an associated L+H* pitch accent that is also the last accent in its intermediate phrase and followed by a !Hphrase accent. The EMU readable version of the Guidelines to ToBI Labelling is available at http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/emu/emu-tobi.shtml. p. 37 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. 6 We note that no site seems to have rigorously adopted the practice envisioned by the original ToBI group of marking silences automatically, on the Misc tier. 7 The intermediate phrase in Greek, like the intermediate phrase in English, is defined by the presence of a phrase accent after the nuclear pitch accent (see Grice, Ladd, & Arvaniti, 1999, for discussion of the cross-linguistic applicability of this concept). Thus, the use of 2 as a marker of two types of tones-breaks mismatch in English has resulted in different numbers correspond to levels that are defined in the same way in the two languages. 8 See http://www.georgetown.edu/luperfoy/Discourse-Treebank/dri-home.html. 9 See http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ame_tobi/annotation_conventions.html for this utterance. Hirst (1999: 73) reports that the sliding head “has been described as typical of Scottish accents” and suggests that it “is probably gaining ground throughout England possibly due to the influence of American speech where the pattern is very common”. Our impression is that it is more characteristic of Australian and New Zealand varieties, particularly those with a strong Scottish English substrate, than it is of mainstream American varieties — see, e.g., Fletcher and Harrington 1996; Ainsworth 2000.

Intonation across Spanish, in the Tones and Break Indices framework

Abstract: This paperdescribes some ofthe moresalientintonationalphenomenaof Spanish, and reviews several of the most pressing questions that remain to be addressed before a deÞnitive model of the system can be incorporated into a consensus transcription system for the language. The phenomena reviewed include the metrical underpinnings of the tune, and some of the local tone shapes that are anchored at stressed syllables or at phrase edges in several common intonation contours. The description of known facts is couched in the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology, as is the review of outstanding questions. The description is used to motivate the preliminary transcription conventions proposed by the Spanish ToBI development group.

Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure.

Abstract: This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subject–verb–object sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer durat...