Phonetic Fieldwork: Working on Tone

1. Phonetic Fieldwork: Working on Tone 2010 Summer School on Documentary Linguistics in West Africa (Intermediate) July 19-July 31 2010

2. What is tone and why work on it? (1) “A language with tone is one in which an indication of pitch enters into the lexical realization of at least some morphemes” (Hyman 2001: 1368). This definition includes the possibilities of pitch variations being:

3. What is tone and why work on it? (2) • lexically contrastive and/or • grammatically contrastive and of there being • tonal morphemes and/or • toneless syllables

4. What is tone and why work on it? (3) • given the phonemic and grammatical importance of tone, it cannot be ignored in a fieldwork situation any more than one might ignore vowels. • asubstantial literature exists; the fieldworker should familiarize him/herself with it before undertaking fieldwork.

5. Importance of training in practical phonetics in doing fieldwork on tone • one of the most important prerequisites to doing good fieldwork is to have sufficient training in practical phonetics • one needs at least to be able to hear and identify new and unfamiliar sounds, and to have the ability to overcome the phonological filter imposed by one’s own language • equally true of both segmental and tonal material

6. The importance of tone • most languages are tonal • tone functions at various levels • lexical (phonological) • grammatical (morphological) • pragmatic • deictic

7. Importance of tone: Lexical tone Table 1: Contrastive lexical tone in Ibibio

8. Importance of tone: Lexical tone Table 2: Contrastive lexical tone in Mambila

9. Importance of tone: grammatical tone Mambila Negation 1. Affirmative mèyı̄láà ‘I call her/him.’ 1S call 3S 2. Negative mèàyı́láŋɡwé ‘I do not call her/him.’ 1S 3S call NEG

10. Importance of tone: use tone in pragmatic function Efik 1. Verb focus ńdébḿmɔ́ŋ I’m buying water. 2. Post verb focus ńdèbḿmɔ́ŋ I’m buying water.

11. Phonetics of tone: Pitch • tone associated with variations in fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch • F0 is the rate of vibration of the vocal folds • variations can in principle be tonally relevant on any voiced segment (but not all pitch is ‘tone’) • pitch is a relative, auditory, characteristic of speech; a given sound is higher or lower in pitch than another sound, rather than high or low in absolute terms

12. Relative nature of pitch • men and women and children have, in general, lower and higher pitched voices respectively • within each group there are individual differences • a given individual may have a higher or lower pitch range than another, and a person’s pitch range may vary under different circumstances • such differences are generally not important in a fieldwork situation; they are normalized in the speech perception process

13. Variable nature of pitch • a given speaker may use a different pitch range on different occasions, or even within the same ‘occasion’, e.g. an elicitation session • various paralinguistic or external influences may trigger such variation • some aspects of pitch variation are potentially problematic in doing field work … • one particular problematic area is that intonation is also produced mainly with pitch variations, which may perturb tone realizations

14. Importance of working with several speakers • the problems associated with the relative and variable nature of tone demand that one works with several different speakers; • comparing across speakers allows us to extract the common pattern in cases of variability

15. Pitch and microprosody (1) • pitch is analyzed as separate from the segmental stream • it is not a feature of the vowel or consonant which carries it • but it is not unaffected by segmental features • consonants on either side of the vowel have a perturbing effect on F0. • voiceless obstruents tend to increase F0 • voiced obstruents lower it • nasals and laterals (and other sonorants), have little effect on F0

16. Pitch and microprosody (2) • vowels also have an influence on F0, known as intrinsic vowel – high vowels have a higher F0 than low vowels, ceterus paribus • these factors may have an influence on how tones are perceived and identified

17. Phonetics of tone: Duration • duration may be relevant to tonal distinctions – contour tones may be longer than level tones – they are typically comprised of two or more level tones • duration may therefore serve as a secondary cue for tone • few studies have reported durational differences associated with tone in African languages

18. Phonetics of tone: Amplitude • amplitude may be relevant to tonal contrasts • amplitude pertains to the loudness of a given sound relative to neighbouring sounds • so (hypothetically) a given tone may be louder (or quieter) than other tones in the inventory • there is a known relationship between pitch and loudness • little research done on this, especially regarding the languages of Africa

19. Phonetics of tone: Phonation type • phonation type (or voice quality) refers to the mode of vibration of the vocal folds • well known contributor to tone contrasts in SE Asian languages, e.g. Vietnamese (creaky voice associated with low tone) • rarely shown to contribute to tone in African languages, though little research has gone so far as to even consider the possibility

20. Eliciting tone: Preliminaries (1) • bound together with eliciting other material, principally through lexical eliciation • we elicit wordlists of basic vocabulary; segmental material is transcribed; indication of pitch variations needs to be included • so, to transcribe tone, one must first be aware of the need to transcribe it (see above)

21. Eliciting tone: Preliminaries (2) • field work manuals suggest having the informant or language assistant whistle the pitch pattern of the word or phrase being elicited, as an aid to hearing the pitch changes in the absence of distracting segmental material • but not everyone can whistle well, and it is harder – for many people – to accurately reproduce pitch differences • so, humming is often preferable • everyone can hum • it involves using the vocal folds (F0) to create pitch

22. Eliciting tone: Preliminaries (3) • even single words pronounced in isolation (as in wordlist elicitation) constitute an utterance or phrase • so may carry pitch features associated with utterances as opposed or in addition to those of words • therefore it is important to work with longer stretches of speech in addition to ‘isolated’ forms • this allows the target word to be placed in different contexts

23. Eliciting tone: Preliminaries (4) • the relative nature of pitch means eliciting isolated words (as in a wordlist) may lead to difficulties identifying tone • it difficult to know which tone indicates a given meaning when words are given in isolation • e.g. in Mambila, baŋ has four meanings, identified by one of four level tones • but heard in isolation it may be difficult to distinguish one tone from another

24. Eliciting tone: using a frame • one means solve this problem to is to use a constant frame, with elicited words embedded in this frame • e.g. in Mambila, the plural marker is bɔ̀, i.e. always with a L tone • so, combining countable nouns with PL allows one to establish tone height relative to L: bɔ̀bàŋ ‘a wound’ bɔ̀bāŋ ‘genets’ bɔ̀báŋ ‘defensive trenches’

25. Eliciting tone: using a frame • using a longer frame, where the target word can be inserted in the middle may be more desirable, but may not be possible very early in the research • e.g. in Mambila, the sentence ‘say ___ quickly’ is pronounced entirely on tone one (High), so target words can be inserted in the blank: túé ____ wáɡáchén

26. Eliciting tone: alternating word sequences • the problem of phrase level effects can be solved by using sentences where the target word can be heard at different places within the phrase; or more simply, by stringing together different tone combinations in different sequences, e.g: bàŋ, bāŋ, baŋ, báŋ; báŋ, bàŋ, bāŋ, baŋ; báŋ, baŋ, bāŋbàŋ; Etc.

27. How many tone contrasts in a language? (1) • the number of contrasts is first and foremost a phonological problem which may not be completely solved in the field • as with segmental material there is no guarantee one will find minimal sets to illustrate the entire tone inventory – especially if it is a relatively large one as found in Mambila

28. How many tone contrasts? (2) • Hyman’s definition of a tone language indicates some syllables/words may be inherently toneless • the verbs of many Edoid languages, for example, are inherently toneless • in such languages tone may be found to play a larger role at the morphological or grammatical level than lexically.

29. How many tone contrasts? (3) Levels vs contours • a question for phonology, which again may or may not be solved in the field • traditionally, African languages have been known as ‘register’ tone languages; i.e. the tonal targets are different pitch heights and tones are typically level • contours that exist on the surface are combinations of tones of different levels • nonetheless at some stage in the investigation the underlying nature of the levels must be established

30. Recording tone • the basic principles followed in recording tone are the same as those used in recording other speech samples to be included in a documentation: aim for the best quality possible • such recordings are at least dual purpose • to provide representative samples for documenting/archiving • to provide data suitable for instrumental analysis – whether or not the fieldworker him/herself intends to do such work.

31. Experimental fieldwork on tone • experimental phonetics and phonology on tone may be done after the basics of the tone system has been established • experimental work typically uses between five and ten speakers, though ideally more: • ten speakers, balanced for gender, age and other possible intervening factors • when working with endangered languages, it is often not possible to have a neatly balanced speaker pool

32. Speech materials for experimental work • Speech materials used must take both of the purposes mentioned into account • an important consideration in developing speech materials for investigating tone is to control for microprosodic effects • e.g. the perturbations of F0 created at the consonant-vowel interfaces, which are most severe with voiceless obstruents, and may be avoided, largely if not totally, by using words containing nasals and laterals when possible.

33. Tone research in speech production and perception • research production on tone production (and pitch realization generally) allows us to establish the physical factors that may govern tone production • such research should be combined with investigation into speech perception, to determine the relative perceptual saliency of these physical factors (see e.g. Connell 2001, Ding 2007, Hombert (1988)

34. Some research issues with tone and pitch realization • establishing the contribution of the different phonetic features which may contribute to tone • determining the relative contribution of tone and other pitch based phenomena to the overall pitch contour of an utterance • the phonetic (and phonological) effect of automatic vs non-automatic downstep • the contribution of tone and other pitch based phenomena in distinguishing questions and statements

35. Some experimental paradigms in investigating tone and pitch • using prompts: speakers read prepared material • role play: speakers interrogate/respond to each other • map task experiments • perception experiments: hearers identify representatives of different tones

36. Documenting/Archiving tone material • Little has been said in the literature on language documentation as to what should be included in a documentation with respect to tone material, or how how such material should be prepared/presented • Himmelmann (2006), Himmelmann & Ladd (2008) while dealing with prosody in documentation and in fieldwork respectively, essentially skirt the issue of tone

37. Documenting/Archiving tone material • open to discussion, but … • certainly recordings, from more than one speaker • representative samples of all contrastive tones and permissible combinations of tones in the language • annotated audio files (e.g. in praat) • with waveform and/or spectrogram, pitch trace, annotation tiers

38. Bibiography Blicher, D. L., R. L. Diehl & L. B. Cohen (1990). Effects of syllable duration on the perception of the Mandarin Tone2/Tone3 distinction: evidence of auditory enhancement. Journal of Phonetics 18, 37–49. Connell, B. (2000). The perception of lexical tone in Mambila. Language and Speech 43, 163–182. Connell, B. & A. Akinlabi (2008). Phonetics and Phonology in Language Documentation. Plenary paper presented at the WALC, Winneba Ghana. Ding, P. S. (2007). The use of perception tests in studying the tonal system of prinmi dialects: A speaker-centered approach to descriptive linguistics. Language Documentation and Conservation 1.2, 154–181. Himmelmann, N. P. (2006). Prosody in language documentation. In Gippert, J., N. P. Himmelmann & U. Mosel (eds.) Essentials of Language Documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 163–181 Himmelmann, N. P. & D. R. Ladd (2008). Prosodic Description: An introduction for fieldworkers. Language Documentation and Conservation 2.2, 244–274. Hombert, J.-M. (1988). Tonper, un test de perception pour langues tonales: application au bulu. Pholia 3, 169–182.

39. Hyman, L. M. (2001) Tone systems. In Martin Haspelmath et al (eds.) Language Typology and Language Universals. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1367–79. Hyman, L. M. (2009). Elicitation as experimental phonology. In Solé, M.-J., P. S. Beddor & M. Ohala (eds.) Experimental Approaches to Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 7–24. Kelly, J. & J. Local (1989). Doing Phonology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Laver, J. (1980). The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perrin, M. (1991). The tone system in Mambila: some further comments. SIL: Yaoundé. Rose, P. (1988). On the non-equivalence of fundamental frequency and pitch in tonal description. In Bradley, D., E. J. A. Henderson & M. Mazaudon (eds.) Prosodic Analysis and Asian Linguistics: to honour R.K. Sprigg. Pacific Linguistics, C-104. 55–82. Thurgood, G. (2002). Vietnamese and tonogenesis: Revising the model and the analysis. Diachronica 19, 333–363. Whalen, D. H. & Y. Xu (1992). Information for Mandarin tones in the amplitude contour and in brief segments. Phonetica 49, 25–47. Zee, E. (1978). Duration and intensity as correlates of F0. Journal of Phonetics 6, 213–220.