This study explored basic intonational units for Albanian, an understudied and typologically rare language of the Indo-European branch, through the lens and assumptions of the autosegmental-metrical framework and ToBI conventions. The emphasis was on broad focus sentences with differently stress patterned target words (e.g. trochaic, iambic, etc), in various sentential positions. General observations from recordings of 21 Standard Albanian speakers and a pilot study with acoustic measurements from a subset of 11 of them show that prominence at the word level is marked post-lexically by a low tone pitch accent which docks at the stressed syllable and is followed by what we propose to be an independent high tone at the end of the word; prominence at the phrase level also suggests post-lexical marking via an Accentual Phrase. The findings lend support to the idea that Albanian is a pitch accent language, which marks prominence at the head and at the edge of the phrase, joining thus, the group of a very small number of languages that do so.
Cite as: Kapia, E., Kleber, F., Harrington, J. (2020) An Autosegmental-Metrical Analysis of Rising Contours in Standard Albanian. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 171-175, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-35
@inproceedings{kapia20_speechprosody,
author={Enkeleida Kapia and Felicitas Kleber and Jonathan Harrington},
title={{An Autosegmental-Metrical Analysis of Rising Contours in Standard Albanian}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={171--175},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-35}
}