Project Details
Projekt
A comparative study ofdownstep: downstep by phrases in German, downstep by focus in Mandarin Chinese, and downstep by tones in Yoruba.
Applicant
Professor Hubert Truckenbrodt, Ph.D.
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2006 to 2010
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 25227840
The proposed research experimentally investigates universal and language-specific properties of the phenomenon of downstep. This phenomenon is central in the understanding of the actual spoken melody of many tone languages as well as of intonation languages. It is located at the interface of the phonological representation (tones, stress, focus, prosodic constituents) and the phonetic realization (actual height of the fundamental frequency; perceived as height of the sentence melody1). Three languages are investigated comparatively, each representing a different class of languages in regard to the topic under investigation: (a) Mandarin Chinese, a tone language that shows downstep as a consequence of syntactic/semantic focus; (b) German, an intonation language that shows downstep as a consequence of the phrasal prosodic configurations of a clause; (c) Yoruba, a tone language spoken in West Africa, that shows downstep in response to certain tonal configurations. Investigations of related questions on all three languages exist; the comparative investigation promises new insights into the nature of downstep in general and into its universal and language-specific properties.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
