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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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According to previous work in Catalan intonation, right-dislocated
phrases are accented, though they tend to be extremely reduced and
subordinated to the main phrase. They might be considered as extreme
cases of tonal subordination, verging on deaccenting. This experiment
tests the hypothesis that they are accented, by comparing the scaling
of syllables under 3 different degrees of prosodic prominence (no stress,
secondary stress and primary stress). If the scaling of the target
syllable increases proportionally to its metrical weight, the conclusion
would be that they have true pitch accents.
The corpus consists
of 324 phrases read by 6 speakers of Central Catalan. The results show
no statistically significant differences between the 3 levels of stress,
and therefore the conclusion is that right-dislocated elements are
deaccented in Catalan.
Bibliographic reference. Aguilera, Lluïsa Astruc (2003): "Intonation of right-dislocations in Catalan", In ICPhS-15, 1265-1268.