14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


High Onset Pitch Accents? The Case of Dyirbal and Warlpiri

Heather B. King

University of Edinburgh, UK

This paper postulates a distinction between two types of high pitch accent in the intonation systems of two Australian Aboriginal languages. Analyses carried out in this preliminary study suggest that in both languages there may be two types of high accent which occur in contrastive distribution in clauseinitial position: a high-rising pitch accent (which peaks after the onset of the stressed vowel) and a high-onset pitch accent (in which the F0 peak occurs at the onset of the accented word). The acoustic properties of these two high pitch accents are discussed in attempt to determine whether the data contains two intonational categories or gradient variations in the realisations of the same category.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  King, Heather B. (1999): "High onset pitch accents? the case of Dyirbal and Warlpiri", In ICPhS-14, 2403-2406.