The Accentual Phrase in Urdu/Hindi: A prosodic unit at the interplay between rhythm and intonation

International audienceIn Urdu/Hindi, the intonation of a sentence consists of a sequence of rising F0 contours (LH). These LH contours are the default intonation pattern associated with a basic prosodic unit which is analyzed either as a foot [1] or as a phonological phrase [2]. [1] , however, reported that a tonal pattern with two F0 rises (LHLH) was observed in morphologically complex words and syntactic phrases, but he did not provide an analysis to predict the occurrence of these double rises. The phonological status of these rises is not clear either. The current research addresses this issue and investigates the contexts in which the realization of double rises is observed. Using data from production experiments and speech corpus, we show that the LHLH pattern is not related to morphological complexity or morpheme type as these rises occur in monomorphemic words as well as in words with inflectional and derivational morphemes. We thus argue that the occurrence of these two rises is rhythmically constrained. Tonal alignment confirms such an analysis in which the first L and the last H tones are regular AP boundary tones, whereas the additional H and L tones are inserted for rhythmic reasons