Fatima Hamlaoui

A flexible approach to the mapping of intonational phrases

We propose that for the syntax–prosody mapping of clauses and intonational phrases, the notion of ‘clause’ should be determined in a flexible manner, making reference to the highest position to which the verbal material (i.e. the verb itself, the inflection, an auxiliary or a question particle) is overtly moved or inserted, together with the material in its specifier. This contrasts with rigid approaches, which assume that mapping is based on particular functional heads. We provide support for this proposal with data from the Bantu language Basaa and the Finno-Ugric language Hungarian, showing that a left-peripheral constituent may be prosodically outside the core intonational phrase even though its syntactic position is relatively low, as long as the verb is even lower, and, conversely, that a constituent may be phrased inside the core intonational phrase even if it is in a syntactically high position, as long as the verb is also high.

Unsupervised phoneme segmentation of previously unseen languages

In this paper we investigate the automatic detection of phoneme boundaries in audio recordings of an unknown language. This work is motivated by the needs of the project BULB which aims to support linguists in documenting unwritten languages. The automatic phonemic transcription of recordings of the unwritten language is part of this. We cannot use multilingual phoneme recognizers as their phoneme inventory might not completely cover that of the new language. Thus we opted for pursuing a two step approach which is inspired by work from speech synthesis for previously unknown languages. First, we detect boundaries for phonemes, and then we classify the detected segments into phoneme units. In this paper we address the first step, i.e. the detection of the phoneme boundaries. For this we again used multilingual and crosslingual phoneme recognizers but were only interested in the phoneme boundaries detected by them and not the phoneme identities. We measured the quality of the segmentations obtained this way using precision, recall and F-measure. We compared the performance of different configurations of monoand multilingual phoneme recognizers among each other and against a monolingual gold standard. Finally we applied the technique to Basaa, a Bantu language.

Aspects of the intonational phonology of Bàsàá

Two major aspects of the intonational phonology of Bàsàá, a Northwest Bantu language spoken in Southern Cameroon with an underlying opposition between high, low and toneless tone bearing units, are presented in this chapter. First, two tonal processes, high tone spreading (HTS) and falling tone simplification (FTS), show sensitivities to prosodic domains: the phonological phrase and the intonational phrase, respectively. Second, tones do not seem to be affected by sentence modalities or information structure. Declarative sentences and yes-no questions show nearly identical intonation patterns, and varying the location of focus in a sentence does not significantly affect sentence prosody either. So far, Bàsàá is a language that shows little interaction between tone and intonation.