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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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For German, the sentence accent allegedly is an important feature
of the prosodic system. It is generally described as an accent that
renders a syllable to be the most prominent of a sentence. Both
location and configuration of the sentence accent are supposed to
contribute to the transmission of sentence structure and meaning.
Thus, the term ‘sentence accent’ is often connected with linguistic
concepts of discourse structure, particularly the so-called focus/
background differentiation. Despite the assumed importance
of the sentence accent, empirical evidence about its phonetic
features is rarely found.
Feature patterns of sentence accent in German interrogative
sentences read-aloud will be presented in this paper. Candidates
for typical feature patterns were found by means of a perception
experiment. Phonetic features were derived from the domains of
fundamental frequency, segmental duration and signal energy.
Bibliographic reference. Englert, Fred (1999): "Feature patterns of sentence accent in German interrogative sentences", In ICPhS-14, 1553-1556.