Vëzhgime akustike të gjymtyrëzimit aktual në shqipe
Acoustic observations of information structure in Albanian

Summary/Abstract: There is very little-known work on the intonation phonology of Albanian, as well as the acoustic and phonological correlates of information structure in this language. The present study offers preliminary evidence on the realization of pitch countours for three independent syntactic constructs, i.e. topic, rheme and kontrast. The study corpus consists of read speech from adult native speakers of Albanian and the data are analyzed within the framework of Autosegmental Metrical Analysis using the ToBI method. As hypothesized based on syntactic data, speakers use acoustic cues to differentiate between the three contracts mentioned above. More specifically, the pitch countour for topic is realized via a low pitch accent that docks onto the stressed syllabled followed by a high boundary tone at the end or near the end of the word. While rheme and kontrast seem to be more similar to each other in terms of their pitch countour realization, wherein the high tone is not a boundary tone that docks at the end of the word anymore, but is a pitch accent that docks onto the stressed syllable, making the pitch contour look more like the shape of a peaked mountain. The difference between the two, rheme vs kontrast, is the fact that for rheme the high pitch accent is lower in hight and arrives a bit later in time than for the syntactic construct of kontrast. Future studies will explore further differences between these two constructs, as well as other types of information offered in discourse for a complete inventory of tones in Albanian language.

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