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The Tune Drives the Text - Schwa in Consonant-Final Loan Words in Italian

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The Tune Drives the Text - Schwa in Consonant-Final Loan Words in Italian The tune drives the text - Schwa in consonant-final loan words in Italian Martine Grice1, Michelina Savino2, Alessandro Caffò2, Timo B. Roettger1 1IfL-Phonetics, University of Cologne, Germany 2Dept. of Education, Psychology, Communication, University of Bari, Italy [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT Although Italian has a very limited number of con- sonant-final words in its native vocabulary, the lan- In Italian, consonant-final loan words are reportedly guage has incorporated a great number of such produced with or without a final schwa. This paper words in recent years, including many proper nouns reveals that variation in the presence of this schwa is [6]. Crucially, their pronunciation is subject to varia- dependent on a number of factors, including the tion [2, 13, 17, inter alia]. Monosyllabic words such metrical structure of the target word and the voicing as ‘chat’ can retain the structure of the donor lan- of the consonant. Crucially, it is also conditioned by guage (in this case English) with the consonant in intonation: Schwa is more likely to occur – and is final position, /͡tʃat/, or the consonant can be fol- acoustically more prominent – when the intonational lowed by a mid central vocoid (henceforth schwa): tune is complex or rising, as opposed to falling. /͡tʃatːə/. Schwa epenthesis can thus be seen as facilitating the Studies on Italian generally analyse this non- production of functionally relevant tunes. lexical word-final schwa as an epenthetic vowel, rather than a phonetic artefact. One strong argument Keywords: Italian, tune-text association, schwa, for its phonological status is that it goes hand in compression, epenthesis hand with a lengthened (geminated) consonant. However, its phonetic properties appear to be prone 1. INTRODUCTION to inter- and intra-speaker variability, as evidenced in the transcriptions [ə] and [ə] (for some varieties Autosegmental-metrical approaches to intonation also [e]; cf. [17]). These observations indicate that involve the association of tones (the tune) with syl- the insertion of schwa is somewhat gradual in na- lables, words and phrases (the text). This association ture, and might be taken as evidence for a less en- does not a priori privilege one of these two levels. If trenched phonological status. the text is suboptimal for bearing the tune, adjust- Returning to Bari Italian, if intonation can condi- ments can be made to either the tune (reducing its tion adjustments to the duration of phrase-final lexi- complexity) or to the text (lengthening the tune- cal vowels, it is also possible that it can play a role bearing portions of voiced, and therefore tone bear- in conditioning the epenthesis of schwa. Our main ing, material). In this paper we are concerned with research question is, thus, whether intonation is the adjustments in the text to accommodate the tune, driving force behind schwa epenthesis. Since the referred to as a local rate adjustment [7] or compres- language has intonation contours other than those in sion [1], [8]. polar questions and neutral statements, we also in- In Bari Italian, the variety of Italian investigated vestigate whether other intonation contours, specifi- in this study, such adjustments have been reported in cally those in different positions in lists ([24], [25]), yes-no questions, which in read speech are typically can play a role in determining epenthesis, too. realised with an accentual rise (L+H*) followed by a Moreover, consonant-final loan words are not al- fall-rise, represented by a L-H% boundary tone se- ways monosyllabic. If they are polysyllabic, the final quence. (Note that in spontaneous questions the syllable is rarely stressed (the final consonant being accentual rise is generally followed by a fall L-L% treated as extrametrical). Word-final schwa epen- [19], [9]). If a phrase-final accented syllable bears thesis in polysyllabic words has received little atten- the rise-fall-rise, it has been found to be consid- tion to date, but has been reported [5]. The question erably lengthened [11], [16] as compared to neutral here is whether the metrical structure also plays a statements, where there is a simple fall in the lower role in conditioning the likelihood of epenthesis. portion of the speaker’s range (H+L* L-L%). These To explore these factors, we elicited intonation studies investigate words with final stress that end in contours with differing complexity and direction of a vowel, such as bambù (/bamˈbu/) ‘bamboo’). pitch change on proper nouns (person names), a The question arises, then, as to what happens common source of loans in the language. Pitch ac- when a word with final stress ends in a consonant. cent placement was elicited on the final and penul- timate syllable of the phrase through the choice of natural way. They were allowed to repeat the target monosyllables and disyllabic trochees, respectively, phrase if they felt it was inappropriate in the context, as target words. In the former, the pitch accent and or in case of disfluency. Speakers were also allowed boundary tones crowd together on one syllable, in to take a break any time they needed, and at least the latter they can potentially spread over two sylla- once every 20 stimuli. bles. 2.3. Analysis 2. METHOD Target words were manually segmented and anno- tated with Praat 5.4 [3]. The labelling of potential 2.1. Speech material schwa was not always straightforward. We thus Target words consisted of 10 monosyllabic and 6 adopted a liberal approach, labelling as a schwa any disyllabic names (Bill, Moll, Tim, Dan, Dag, Fred, interval presenting periodic vibrations accompanied Chris, Jeff, Matt, Dick for the monosyllables, and by a local increase in the signal energy at the conso- Caleb, Colin, Carol, Edith, Derek, Dennis for the nantal release, and/or any interval after the conso- disyllables). nantal release with formant structure or energy in the These target words were elicited in five Prosodic F2/F3 region characteristic of vowels. Conditions: (polar) Questions and (neutral) State- Data were statistically analysed, using R [15] ments, and in three distinct positions in lists consist- looking at the question-statement and list data sets ing of six names: Non-Final (NF), Pre-Final (PF) separately. Since this is the first look at a controlled and Final (F). For each prosodic condition, target and balanced data set produced by a rather homoge- words were produced with an appropriate context, as nous group of speakers, we were able to explore the follows (see also Figure 1): data set using random forests [4], implemented by the party R package [12, 20, 21]. For a discussion of (1) Question: these techniques in the context of linguistics and Ha chiamato [target name]? ‘Did [target name] call?’ sociolinguistics, see [22]. Random forests is a data No, ha chiamato [name]. ‘No, [name] called.’ mining technique used for classification. It is a so- e.g. Ha chiamato Jeff? called “ensemble method” because a multitude of decision trees is constructed (500 in this case). Each (2) Statement (answer): tree takes a set of variables and sees which variable Chi ha chiamato? ‘Who called?’ best splits the data according to a particular criterion. Ha chiamato [target name]. ‘[target name] called.’ e.g. Ha chiamato Jeff. Each tree is built on a random subset of variables and data. The final classification is based on the (3) NonFinal, PreFinal and Final: overall ensemble of trees. Ecco la lista dei nomi: ‘Here is the list of names:’ Random forests allow us to identify which fac- [NF target], [NF target], [NF target], [NF target], tors are independently relevant for determining the [PF target], [F target].’ presence vs. absence of schwa. The following fac- e.g. Dan, Colin, Dennis, Moll, Matt, Fred. tors were included in the analysis: Factors capturing idiosyncratic properties of SPEAKERS and WORDS; (Lists were constructed with NF target names in one factors capturing differences in the identity of the of the first four positions per list.) final consonant coded as ± VOICED, ± SONORANT, and ± STOP; a factor capturing metrical character- Thus, there were 160 items in total (16 target words istics of the target word coded as SYLLABLE x 5 Prosodic Conditions x 2 repetitions) per speaker. NUMBER (including monosyllables and disyllabic trochees); and most importantly, factors capturing 2.2. Participants and procedure prosodic characteristics of the contour coded as Ten native Bari Italian speakers participated in the PROSODIC CONTEXT, reflecting sentence modality: recording session on a voluntary basis. They were all question and statement in the question-statement female (aged 22-29) and undergraduate students of data set, and the position: non-final (NF), pre-final Psychology at the University of Bari, without a (PF), and final (F) in the list data set. background in phonetics or prosody. Speakers were seated in front of a computer 3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION screen, wearing a headset microphone (AKG C520) connected to a Marantz PMD 661 digital recorder. 3.1. Contours Each stimulus was presented on the screen with its The intonation contours in both data sets corres- context, and speakers were instructed to read first ponded to our expectations based on previous stud- silently and then aloud at a normal pace and in a ies, which were also based on read speech. In the question-statement dataset, questions were produced present in 79% of all instances in the question- predominantly with a rise-fall-rise (L+H* L-H%) statement data set and 74% of all instances in the list and occasionally with a rise-fall (L+H* L-L%), data set. whereas statements had a low fall (H+L* L-L%). See Figure 1 (a), (b) for examples.
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