The phonetics and phonology of intonational phrasing in Romance

Previous work on intonational phrasing in Romance has addressed the role of syntactic and prosodic structure on the placement of boundaries within SVO utterances (Elordieta et al. 2003, D'Imperio et al. to appear). A comparable database of 744 utterances was created for the 5 languages and varieties under study: Catalan (Cat), European Portuguese (both the Standard variety and the Northern variety spoken in Braga, SEP and NEP respectively), Italian (Neapolitan variety), and Spanish. The patterns of phrasing found were described and discussed, but a detailed inspection of the nature of the boundary cues was left undone. The present paper investigates the phonetics and phonology of the perceived phrasing boundaries established in previous work. We have three related goals: 1) to provide a typology of the boundary cues used by each language and determine their relative frequency; 2) to describe the phonetics of the dominant phonological choices to mark phrasing boundaries; 3) to better understand the extent to which Romance languages differ in their phonological boundary markers and/or in the phonetic instantiation of similar phonological choices.All the utterances previously classified as with and without a clear phrasing boundary were extracted from the compared Romance languages database. The utterances were perceptually and acoustically analysed. Resorting to spectrograms and F0 contours, a number of F0 and duration measurements were taken for each token. The results reported below are based on a random sample of 405 utterances. As shown in Table 1, prosodic breaks in Romance are usually marked by a High boundary tone. The preboundary stretch tends to be realised as a rise on the last stressed syllable, which extends to the boundary syllable (continuation rise) or forms a high plateau up to the boundary (sustained pitch). Italian deviates from the other languages due to its dominant use of sustained pitch. Other cues, such as pitch reset and preboundary lengthening are used by all languages but with different rates. In our database, the possibility of a Low boundary tone (in the EP case with a drop to the utterance base level) joins SEP, NEP and It against Cat and Sp. The phonetics of the H boundary tone points to the same language grouping, as shown by the scaling ratios in Table 2. However, It patterns with Cat and Sp with respect to pitch reset. Note that the height of the boundary tone is more extreme in the languages that make more use of it, in the same way that reset values are higher in the languages that more frequently resort to this boundary marker.Romance languages mainly signal phrasing boundaries with rises. Nevertheless, our data shows that not only the phonology (choice of pitch accent, boundary tone, phrasing level), but also the specific phonetics (scaling of boundary tone, scaling of pre- and post-boundary peaks) of the boundary gesture may differ, even among closely related languages