Sentence intonation: a dynamical gestural approach
Yubin Zhang, UW-Madison
The phonology of sentence types or speech acts—such as declaratives versus interrogatives—has often been analyzed as sequential symbolic tones, like pitch accents and boundary tones. But this approach cannot capture the rich temporal and multidimensional structure of sentence intonation or sentence type prosody in speech production. In this talk, I take a dynamical gestural perspective, viewing phonology of sentence type or speech acts as the coordinated linguistic actions of three speech production subsystems: the laryngeal tonal system, respiration, and supraglottal articulation. A tonal study on Yoruba intonation shows sentence-level pitch register raising and expansion for its polar questions, beyond what discrete symbols can represent. Respiratory evidence from Yoruba further reveals higher lung volume velocity and smaller overall lung volume in its polar questions, indicating active respiratory involvement in signaling sentence type. Real-time vocal tract articulatory data from Setswana show that its intonational-phrase penultimate lengthening is reduced in polar questions but not entirely suspended. Nevertheless, non-penultimate gestures also shorten in questions, though to a lesser extent, suggesting a more general sentence-level timing mechanism that modulates sentence types. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that sentence type contrasts involve more than just tones. A dynamical gestural approach provides a principled framework for capturing the rich temporal and multiple dimensions of sentence type prosody in speech production.
