ABSTRACT
Recall from the discussion in the introduction (1.1.7) that tune-text association has been one of the central questions in Intonational Phonology (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Home (ed.), 2001). Tonal alignment with the segmental string is precisely controlled as was shown early on by Bruce (1977) and by Pierrehumbert (1980). However, alignment of tonal targets varies across and within languages. Some factors that affect tonal alignment include: categorical tone distinctions, pragmatic context (e.g., narrow focus), tonal context (crowding), and position within a prosodic phrase. It was pointed out in Chapter 1 that, for example, in Swedish, tonal alignment determines the distinction between two lexically contrastive accents: Accent I and Accent II (HL* vs. H*L, Bruce, 1990) while the same alignment distinction in English arises from the contrastive pragmatically-defined pitch-accents (L*+H vs. L+H*). Furthermore, pragmatic narrow focus induces changes in the overall pitch contours and in the precise alignment of tonal targets through the introduction of an additional sentential H tone in Swedish (Bruce, 1977), through pitch-peak retraction in Greek and Spanish (Botinis, 1998; Face, 2001), or through pitch-peak protraction in European Portuguese and Palermo Italian (Frota, 2000; Grice, 1995). Some of these pragmatically induced alignment changes have been analyzed as consisting of categorical distinctions between accent types: H+L* vs. H*+L for European Portuguese (Frota 2000) and Palermo Italian (Grice 1995), L*+H vs. L+H* for Spanish (Face 2001), H* vs. L* for Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991). In these analyses, the difference in the tonal alignment in narrow focus is placed in the realm of phonology through the inventory of contrastive pitch-accents. However, in other analyses, the same phenomena of timing differences in the
in Two Dialects ofCroatian expression of pragmatic information are explained through gradient alignment effects rather than categorical distinctions (Nibert 2000, Hualde 2002b, Ladd 1996: 96-98). Finally, prosodic context, i.e., proximity to other tones and/or boundaries, causes earlier tonal alignment (Prieto et. aI., 1995; Silverman and Pierrehumbert, 1990). All of these studies suggest that tonal alignment is sensitive to a combination of the factors mentioned above and that several mechanisms, such as those underlying pragmatic focus and prosodic position, define tonal realization.
