AUC PHILOLOGICA
AUC PHILOLOGICA

AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.

AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2014 No 1 (2014), 55–68

Melodemes in Speech: Their Stability and Confusions

Zdena Palková

published online: 28. 12. 2014

abstract

The melodeme, a stabilized contour of F0 which serves as a means of communicating a particular type of attitudinal modality, distinguishing declarative, interrogative and progredient modes, is a relevant part of sentence intonation in Czech. The melodeme is usually carried by the last phonetic word of a phrase. Differentiation between variants of individual melodemes is sufficient in theoretical description as well as in acoustic reality of neutral standard speech. In common speech, especially expressive or emotional, confusion between the intention of the speaker and the interpretation of the listener cannot be ruled out. In the study we use a perceptual probe to investigate similarities between contours of different melodemes and acoustic features that affect their recognition when isolated from context.

keywords: intonation; intonation phrase; stress-group; melodeme; types of mode; F0 contours; listening test; Czech language

230 x 157 mm
periodicity: 3 x per year
print price: 150 czk
ISSN: 0567-8269
E-ISSN: 2464-6830

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