Bracks Christoph. Compound Intonation Units in Totoli: Postlexical prosody and the prosody-syntax interface

Berlin: Language Science Press, 2024. — viii, 182 p. — (Topics in Phonological Diversity 2). — ISBN 978-3-96110-436-9.This book is an investigation into aspects of prosody, intonation and the prosody-syntax interface in Totoli, an endangered Austronesian language. With a strongly data-driven approach, the study integrates a combination of experimental evidence from both production and perception with corpus-based evidence through descriptive and inferential statistics.
The study takes the prime structuring unit of speech — the Intonation Unit — as its principal unit of investigation. It presents a thorough description of the IU, develops an intonational model of it, and investigates the syntactic units it contains. The author argues that the data is best analysed by assuming recursive embedding of Intonation Units into Compound Intonation Units.
This research represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the nature of prosodic systems found in the languages of the region and in intonational systems in general. It is one of the few investigations into the intonation of Austronesian languages and its analytical proposals are relevant both to prosodic theory and to phonological typology.Acknowledgments.
Abbreviations and symbols.
Introduction.
Information on the Totoli language.
Aspects of the segmental phonology of Totoli.
Phoneme inventory.
Vowel length.
Phonotactics and word structure.
Research on the prosody of Austronesian languages.
The units of spoken speech.
Experimental approaches to the prosody of Totoli.
Investigating the role of prosodic prominence through a Rapid Prosody Transcription experiment.
Materials.
Participants.
Procedure.
Analysis.
Discussion.
Investigating the role of prosodic prominence through a focus marking experiment.
Materials.
Acoustic analysis.
Perception experiment.
Discussion.
Conclusion.
Corpus-based approaches to the intonation of Totoli.
Properties of the Compound Intonation Unit in Totoli in a cross-linguistic perspective.
The corpus.
Distribution of Chafeian IU types in the corpus.
The length of Intonation Units of the corpus.
An intonational model of the Compound Intonation Unit in Totoli.
Tonal events at the right-edge boundaries of CIUs.
Tonal events at the boundaries of non-final, embedded IUs of CIUs.
Phonetic variability.
Discourse particles.
Discussion.
Intonation Units and grammatical units in Totoli.
Syntactic structures of singleton IUs and CIUs.
Syntactic structures of embedded IUs of CIUs.
Comparing the syntax and prosody of embedded IUs of CIUs with singleton IUs.
Discussion.
Summary and Discussion.
Appendix.
RPT Experiment.
Recorded speaker information.
Participant information.
Instructions of boundary marking task.
Instructions of prominence marking task.
Focus marking.
Recorded speaker information.
Participant information.
Stimuli.
Instructions.
The corpus.
References.
Index.
Name index.
Language index.
Subject index.