> Sarah,
>
> > (c) many of his examples sound to us as if they have contrastive stress.
> >
> >We assume that, with some practice, Mark would be able to modify the
> >constrastive stress into ordinary nuclear, and that he'd be willing to put
> >in the practice necessary, so we don;t see that as a major problem.
>
> I can't let this one pass -- it was DELIBERATE in the cases where it
> occurs, because I specified AGs containing 2 feet
sorry, I should have been more explicit. Most of the examples sound to us
as if they have contrastive stress, even in the single AGs e.g. It's
YORKtalk. I'm at home now, and don't have those notes with me, but I will
send them on tomorrow.
>
> I'm a bit puzzled as to why early nucleus should be a problem for you:
> please enlighten! For me it is very interesting to include these
> structures, as it allows me to investigate the domain of f0 patterns
> related to pitch accents.
Therefore, early nucleus isn't a problem: I do want some instances of
contrastive stress as do you. But I don;t want it to be the default.
> I'm not the best person to comment on the other problems so I won't.
> But I do get nervous about encouraging speakers to use something other
> than their normal, natural voices: something of the tail wagging the dog
> here, though it may be the only way round things.
I agree - not desirable. But in fact most of the people we might
consider using have spent significant time modifying their everyday voices
and/or their recording voices. E.g. Francis has (to make his f0 fit the
theory, I think he once told me), I have (to make acoustic analysis
easier, though I need do it much less nowadays than I had to with older
technology), I suspect Michael Ashby has. One thing that has occurred to
me is that some of the things I have reservations about are in fact
properties of RP and near-RP. This might even include the large shifts
in amplitude between stressed and unstressed sylls, thus leaving me and
Ali with the impression of contrastive stress. (But Jonny Rodgers, an RP
speaker, had the same impression of MArk's utterances as we did, I
believe.)
If we decide not to ask Mark to speak with a more modal voice, I really
think we have to try to find a more suitable voice. The real problem,
obviously, is the automatic formant tracking. If we have to hand-measure
everything we want formant measures for, we'll not make enough progress. I
will try to get something more to you all tomorrow. Meanwhile, Yorkies,
it would be very helpful if you could you tell us what you think, if
possible on Friday. (I know you;re busy, so don;t do it if it's too much.)
best wishes
Sarah
______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Sarah Hawkins Email: sh110@cam.ac.uk
Dept. of Linguistics Phone: +44 1223 33 50 52
University of Cambridge Fax: +44 1223 33 50 53
Sidgwick Avenue or +44 1223 33 50 62
Cambridge CB3 9DA
United Kingdom