Rhythm and Intonation in Halh Mongolian

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive account of the prosody of Halh (Khalkha) Mongolian as spoken in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of the Republic of Mongolia. The phonological description is based on acoustic analysis of speech data collected from nine Mongolian-speakers. The dissertation consists of two major parts, the first dealing with rhythmic and the second with tonal properties of Halh Mongolian. The description of rhythm includes an investigation of prominence at the word level and of deletion and insertion of vowels in connected speech. The analysis proposed assumes that there is no lexical stress in Halh Mongolian. The tonal part of the dissertation concerns the description of tonal means with basic communicative functions, such as focusing and phrasing in declarative and interrogative utterances. Pragmatically non-neutral utterances are also investigated. Besides the focal accent, a word accent is proposed as a prosodic category in Mongolian, and the alignment of the tonal gestures is described using mora counting. A division into formal and casual speech style is made in order to account for differences found in the speech material