Ivan Chow

Representation and Interpretation of intonation: a diachronic view

Historically, research on the linguistic role of intonation has been devoted to phoneticians rather than phonologists, so that earlier work was essentially empirical, and strongly influenced by technologies such as acoustical analysis of speech. Later, important psycho acoustic studies allow shifting from physical data to perceptual descriptions, which together with the use of generative grammar axioms, lead to present dominant representation and interpretation such as ToBI. This paper will examine the multimodal aspects of these changes where graphical representation of sound plays a crucial role in the development of intonation models.