Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications Athens, Greece September 18-20, 1997

Comparative Intonational Phonology: English and German

Esther Grabe

Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

This paper presents a selection of results from an autosegmental-metrical comparison of intonation in Northern Standard German and Southern British English. Evidence from a cross-linguistically comparable corpus of speech data suggests that the languages share a common inventory of phonological representations but differ in the way these representations are realised phonetically. Evidence for a shared tonal inventory comes from a discussion of intonation phrase boundaries and evidence for a difference in phonetic realisation from differences in pitch accent accommodation effects.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Grabe, Esther (1997): "Comparative intonational phonology: English and German", In INT-1997, 157-160.