Observations on Basic Intonational Patterns of Questions and Statements in Standard Lithuanian
Observations on Basic Intonational Patterns of Questions and Statements in Standard Lithuanian

Summary/Abstract: The paper represent This paper discusses the results of the pilot study on intonational patterns of questions and statements in Lithuanian. Special attention is devoted to the tone changes at the end of the intonational phrase, i.e. to the boundary tone and the pitch accent of the last word. In order to identify the main patterns, a corpus of 96 tokens (statements, questions with wh-word ‘kada’ and yes/no questions with and without interrogative word ‘ar’ read by four speakers) has been examined. F0 measurements were extracted using Praat. The audio files were annotated based on the main principles of the autosegmental-metrical phonology: high tone is marked with H, low tone – L, pitch accent – ‘*’ and boundary tone – ‘%.’ In the perception experiment, the participants were asked to identify the statements and questions (the interrogative words were removed). 21 native speakers participated in the experiment. The results have shown that the end of the statements in Standard Lithuanian is described by low tones (L* L%), whereas questions can have tones as follows: high-low (HL* L%), low (L* L%) and low-high (LH* H%). The tone patterns at the end of the questions depend on the presence or absence of the interrogation word: wh- questions are characterized by low tones at the end of phrase (L *L%), yes/no questions with an interrogative word ‘ar’ may have low (L* L%) or rising tones (LH* H%), and yes/no questions without an interrogative word end in rising (LH* H%) or falling (HL* L%) tones. The patterns with low or falling tones are common for the questions with an interrogative word and (or) focus word in a non-final position of the phrase. The results of the perception experiment allow us to draw preliminary conclusions that the high boundary tone, the interrogative word and the pitch accent of the focused word are equivalent markers of a question in Lithuanian.s a distinctive attempt to trace the development of the preposition and the adverb ‘on’ as the initial and transposed categories. The study focuses on their evolution throughout 16 historical time spans – since 850 and up to the present time. The research is based on 7 954 Old English, 2 368 Middle English, 4 251 Early Modern English examples, which have been obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and analyzed without applying any corpus software; 174 581 examples of Late Modern English from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, which have been processed by means of the Lancsbox software tool; and the statistical data on 7 118 454 examples of Present-Day English retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. The paper attests that ‘on’ is formed at the first stage (before 850) of the Old English period as the preposition and at the next stage (850–950) is transposed into the category of the adverb, which is characterized by a further slight increase in the statistics and stabilization of its correlation with the preposition ‘on’. Correlation between the categories had remained stable up to the Early Modern English period, when the category of the adverb has started its sustainable growth, which is currently being observed in the English language. The paper proves that in Early Modern English the process of functional transposition is superseded by an utterly new stage of lexicalization which leads to formation of phrasal verbs.

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