Sun-Ah Jun
Word Prominence and Intonation
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Sun-Ah Jun
Sun-Ah Jun
Sun-Ah Jun is a Professor at UCLA, Department of Linguistics (Ph.D at Ohio State University, 1993). She has also taught at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Summer Institute and at the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT) Summer School. Her research interests include intonational phonology, prosodic typology, the effect of prosody in segment perception and sentence processing, the interface between prosody/syntax/focus, and language acquisition.
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Sun-Ah Jun
Word Prominence and Intonation
Languages differ in ways to make a word prominent in an utterance. In languages that have lexical stress like English, it is well established that a word becomes prominent by assigning a pitch accent on the stressed syllable of the word. But for languages that have no stress like Korean, it is claimed in Jun (2005, 2014) that a word becomes prominent by marking the edge of the word with an Accentual Phrase (AP) boundary tone. In addition to the “head”-prominence languages like English and the “edge”-prominence languages like Korean, there are languages where word prominence is marked by both a pitch accent and an (AP-like) edge tone (e.g., Bengali, Georgian, French), i.e., “head/edge”-prominence languages. It has been observed that head/edge-prominence languages typically have a ‘weak head’ phonetically and phonologically, i.e., the acoustic correlates of stress are weak and stress is not distinctive due to having a fixed location of stress. Since both edge-prominence and head/edge-prominence languages have highly rhythmic intonation patterns derived from a regular tonal marking of AP, it was hypothesized that languages use an AP to mark word prominence to compensate for the weak or lack of head marking. Drawing on my recent research, however, I demonstrate that the link between word prosody, AP, and prominence type needs to be loosened because a language can have both a ‘strong’ head and an AP, but only one of them can be involved in marking word prominence (e.g., Paraguayan Guarani) or either can be used to mark word prominence depending on information structure considerations (e.g., Farasani Arabic).