Intonational phrases

The other main area of interest in tune description concerns what happens at the ends of intonation phrases. Often FO is low at a phrase boundary, but in many circumstances FO is high. For instance, if another phrase directly follows the current one, a continuation rise may be present. If the tune is that of a yes/no question, the final pitch may also be high. The British school deals with these effects by using different nuclear accent and tail configurations. The AM model makes use of high and low boundary tones which distinguish the different types of contour. 

Figure 9.2 High Fall, "Anna came with Manny 1 . This shape corresponds to a British high fall , + raised or pitch level 4. In this particular utterance there is still a single intonation phrase, and the word "anna also has an accent, but this accent is pre-nuclear. Some may argue that there is no phonological distinction between fall and high fall, and that the high fall is really just an extra prominent fall.

In the account given by Crystal, the most important part of the contour is the nucleus which is the only mandatory part of an intonation phrase. The nuclear accent can take one of several configurations, e.g. fall, fall-rise, low rise. Other parts of the contour are termed the tail (T) which follows the nucleus, the head (H) which starts at the first accented syllable of the intonation phrase and continues to the nucleus, and the pre-head (P) which precedes the head. The intonation phrase has a grammar of (P) (H) N (T), where the brackets denote optional elements. 

Koehn, R, Abney, S., Hirschberg, J., and Collins, M. Improving intonational phrasing with syntactic information. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing 2000 (2000). 

Qang, M. Q., and Hirschberg, J. Automatic classification of intonational phrase boundaries. Computer Speech and Language 6 (1992), 175-196. 

Sun, X., and Applebaum, T. H. Intonational phrase break prediction using decision tree and n-grammodel. n Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001 (2001). 

Zervas, P., Maragoudakis, M., Fakotakis, N., and Kokkinakis, G. Bayesian induction of intonational phrase breaks. ]n Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (2003). 

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