Levels of representation and levels of analysis for the description of intonation systems

International audienceIt is argued that a satisfactory global theory of intonation will require four levels of analysis : (i) physical (acoustic, physiological) (ii) phonetic (iii) surface phonological and (iv) deep phonological. The theoretical and cognitive status of each level is discussed and specific proposals are made for a model respecting such an overall architecture as well as a condition of interpretability which requires that each level of representation be interpretable in terms of adjacent levels. The level of phonetic representation is conceived of as providing an interface between abstract cognitive representations and their physical manifestations. This level is also assumed to provide an interface between constraints on production and perception. For fundamental frequency an algorithm, MOMEL, for the automatic derivation of a representation as a sequence of target-points is presented. The level of surface phonological representation is seen as the prosodic equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet for phonemic representation. A symbolic coding system for fundamental frequency patterns (INTSINT) is described which is currently being used for the automatic coding of fundamental frequency patterns for continuous texts in a number of different languages. The level of deep phonological representation is described as the level of linguistically significant choices which interact with a number of language-specific prosodic parameters to generate observed intonation patterns