Traditional analyses

Before the AM tradition of intonational analysis, the study of intonation has followed two main lines of research, which in Ladd’s (1996) terms are known as the

instrumental or phonetic tradition and the impressionistic or proto-phonological

tradition. The instrumental approach mainly aimed at characterising the acoustic cues of intonation but no attention was paid to identifying the phonological events that made up pitch contours. The impressionistic view, on the other hand, was more phonologically-oriented. Their work was mainly based on perceptual and auditory analyses of the data but little experimental work was carried out. One of the advantages of the AM model is that it combines an experimental approach to intonation with a theoretical insight.

The impressionistic view covers the work of two main traditions: the British and the American schools (see Ladd 1980 and Cruttenden 1986 for reviews on these frameworks). In brief, the two schools constitute the two exponents of a long debate in the study on intonation, namely, the question whether pitch phenomena should be described in terms of levels or configurations (terms suggested by Bolinger 1951).

1.3.1.1 The British tradition

One of the main goals of the British tradition of intonational analysis was to describe intonation for didactic purposes, basically for teaching pronunciation. The tenets of the British approach, although designed for the transcription of English intonation, have been used in many other languages (including a few works on Catalan). There are two basic aspects that characterise the work pursued in this tradition, namely, the division of pitch contours into several component parts, and the configurational

analysis of tone. Palmer (1922) was the first to divide the pitch contour into a nuclear constituent (the nucleus) preceded by a prenuclear portion (the head) and followed by

a tail. Kingdon (1958) added a further subdivision of the prenuclear part of the

contour into the head and a prehead Thus, a tone unit (stretch of utterance) consists of an obligatory element, the nucleus, and three optional ones, the prehead, the head and the tail. Crystal (1969) described these four components in terms of rhythmic prominence, that is, by distinguishing between stressed, unstressed and accented syllables. The prehead consists of all syllables before the onset of the first accented syllable. The head comprises the string of syllables from the first accented syllable up to the syllable before the nucleus. Finally, the tail is made up of all syllables after the nuclear one. The compositional analysis of tune is followed by most scholars of the British tradition (O’Connor and Arnold 1973, Ashby 1978, Gimson 1980, Couper- Kuhlen 1986, Cruttenden 1986 and Tench 1996, among others).

The analysis of intonation pursued by the British School was mainly configurational, that is, it was based on pitch movement rather than on pitch levels (as opposed to the American tradition). For them, the phonological primitives involved categories such as fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, high or low among others. A relevant premise of this approach is that certain entities can only be attached to specific structural constituents. For example, high and low are events related to the head constituent only, whereas

fall-rise or rise-fall can only appear in the nuclear component. (1.14) illustrates the tonal transcription for the sentence Peter brought the books (produced with a broad focus reading) according to O ’Connor and Arnold’s analysis. The sentence consists of a high head (marked [']) followed by a low fall nuclear accent (marked [ ]).

(1.14)

'Peter bought the books

1.3.1.2 The American tradition

The aim of the American structuralist tradition is to describe intonation as part of a phonemic theory. This approach is mainly represented by the works of Pike (1945), Wells (1945) and Trager and Smith (1951), and subsequently developed in Liberman (1975) and in the autosegmental work of Leben (1976) and Goldsmith (1976). Pitch contours are described as a series of pitch level phonemes. In Pike, the speaker’s pitch range is divided into four relative phonemic pitch levels, /I, 2, 3 and 4/, where III

means high and /4/ low. In Trager and Smith, the reverse order is proposed (/I/ for low and /4/ for high). Pitch phonemes are located at the beginning of an utterance, before the primary stress and at the end, although they may appear in other sentence positions as well. In Trager and Smith, three phonemes of terminal juncture are added into the system. They are characterised by pitch movement: fall /#/, rise /| |/ and level / 1 /. In this view, a pitch contour consists of a series of pitch phonemes and a terminal juncture. For example, the sentence Peter brought the books would be represented as in (1.15), where 3 stands for a mid level, 2 and 1 for lower pitch levels and # for a fall terminal juncture.

(1.15)

Peter bought the books #

3 2 1

Later developments of the level analysis of intonation within the autosegmental approach propose to reduce the number of pitch accents to three levels and the idea of phonemes at the terminal junctures develops into the notion of boundary tone, i.e. an underlying phoneme manifested phonetically by pitch movement at an intonational boundary (Liberman 1975).

The AM approach of intonational analysis inherits several aspects from the American School, in particular, the level analysis of pitch (although reduced to two categories) and the notion of boundary tone.

1.3.2 Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology