12 Feb 2002

Bob Ladd & Michaela Atterer

Regional differences in intonation are often treated in phonological terms. For example, Northern and Southern German are sometimes said to have categorically distinct pitch patterns for accented syllables (e.g. in ToBI-style notation H* or L+H* for Northern and L*+H for Southern). Similar claims have been made in studies of other languages. However, this paper argues that some such differences must be treated as different phonetic realisations of "the same" phonological category. This conclusion is based on a close acoustic analysis of the alignment of accentual rises with segmental landmarks (e.g. beginning and end of stressed vowel) in Northern and Southern German, and comparison of the results with past work on Greek, English, and Dutch. Differences between varieties and between languages are shown to be small and not plausibly related to phonologically distinct patterns of tonal association.

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