The transmission of meaning through prosodic phrasing
The case of Germanic languages versus French
Klaus J. Kohler
IPDS, Kiel
Workshop on Intonational Phrasing in Romance and in Germanic
Research Centre on Multilingualism, University of Hamburg
Invited Paper, 23 January 2009
1
The goal of the Workshop
• discussion of patterns of phrasing in Romance and
Germanic languages, i.e. syntagmatic chunking of
utterances
– prosodic cues including pitch phenomena, timing,
pauses, intensity, segmental features at phrasal
boundaries and inside phrases, to mark the
syntagmatic structuring
– the weights of these individual features in their
bundlings in different languages
– the relationship between prosodic and syntactic
phrasing
• concentration on read speech over the past decades to
be supplemented by spontaneous data
• the discussion is to take place within the framework
of Autosegmental Metrical Phonology
– on this point, I am not sure whether you will regret
having invited me when you have heard my talk
– because I am not a member of the AM and ToBI
clubs and thus do not deal in Hs, Ls, stars and all
the other accessories of this descriptive tool, which
is the dominating fashion of the day
• an instance of what Jan van Santen calls the
sociology of science rather than science
• My theoretical stance is defined by
speech communication science
– the objective of investigation is the transmission of
meaning by speech between communicators in social
interaction in different languages
– thus, meaning and communicative function must be
the core level to which linguistic form and phonetic
substance are related
– and meaning must embrace all fields of semantics
• propositional meaning related to the outside world
• attitudinal meaning directed towards the recipient
• expressive meaning embodying the sender
• In AM, the relationship is reversed
– form is at the centre
– meaning and function are peripheral adjuncts and
generally restricted to propositional meaning
– this relegates attitudinal and expressive meaning to
paralinguistics and creates a linguistic dichotomy
– with discrete categories in linguistics vs. gradience
in paralinguistics
– this in turn leads to discrete phonology vs. scalar
phonetics
• all this misses the central sense – sound relationship
in speech communication
– which entails all types of meaning at all times
– and is particularly crucial in prosodic analysis
• where discreteness is the exception rather than
the rule
• and where the postulate of an indirect
relationship of phonetic substance to meaning
via phonological form bars us from essential
insights
• The AM framework has serious consequences for the
methodology of speech data acquisition
– Since the postulated formal, cognitive units of a
language are the object of investigation, rather than
communicative functions in speech interaction,
• any native speaker of a dialect is a potential
source for analysis, commonly of lab speech
• they all speak with one tongue, and God's Truth
emanates from their lips
• subjects do not need any screening as to their
language proficiency, they are taken as available
• tests can be carried out with meaningless phrases
– in the 1980s, Bannert aimed at describing the phonetic
manifestation of phrase accents in German
• collected production data with variations of the
constructed sentence
Der lullende Müller in Lingen will die längeren
Männer in der Menge immer lungernde Lümmel
nennen.
"The peeing miller from Lingen will always call
the longer men in the crowd lay-about rascals."
– reminiscent of Bruce's
man vill lämna nåra långa nunnor.
“one wants to leave some long nuns” (1977)
– nonsense still practised a quarter of a century later
Die Nonne und der Lehrer wollen der Lola in Murnau eine
Warnung geben, und die Hanne will im November ein Lama
malen.
"The nun and the teacher want to give a warning to
Lola from Murnau, and Hanna wants to paint a lama
in November." (Truckenbrodt 2002)
– or quite recently
{The sheep wanted to introduce the buck to the lion.
Why didn't he do it?}
Weil der Hammel den Rammler dem Hummer vorgestellt hat.
"Because the sheep introduced the buck to the
lobster." (Féry & Kügler 2008)
– degree of nonsense actually increased over the
years
– reason is as clear as it is unacceptable
• to be able to trace continuous f0 through
voiced sounds – vowels, laterals, nasals
• analysis method determines speech material
instead of vice versa
– and the fixation on cognitive linguistic form
instead of communicative function provides the
theoretical basis for this nonsense
– rote-fashion reading with several repetitions
• students attending linguistics courses
• assumption that they will all realise the same
underlying phonological accents relevant for
the intonation of the language
• no consideration for potential production
artefacts created by the odd material and the
collection method, e.g. boredom, which
changes pitch accent realization drastically
– from such data, pitch and phrase accents are
derived as phonological categories of the language
2
The coding of meaning through prosodic phrasing
• My stance is akin to scholars such as Karl Bühler,
Alan Gardiner, Bronislaw Malinowski, J. R. Firth,
and the European linguistic tradition, not to forget
Dwight Bolinger, before the AM mission
• From this position, I am now going to give some
illustrations as to how I think meaning is coded
through prosodic phrasing in French, in English and
in German.
• To put you into the mood for a switch from your AM
expectations to my sense-sound framework and to the
Kiel Model of Intonation (KIM)
– I would like to ask you to cast your thoughts back
264 years to the 11th of May 1745
– and to a small Hamlet, Fontenoy, in what today is
Belgium
– on this day, a fierce battle took place
• between the Allied Anglo-Hanoverian, Dutch,
and Austrian army under the command of the
Duke of Cumberland
• and the French army under le Maréchal Saxe
• the Allied Forces lost.
– These are the historical facts. Now come the
legends.
• The legends differ on the two sides of the Channel.
– The French version says that the commanding
officer of the French Guards advanced towards the
English line, took off his hat, and called:
Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers!
Un bon example de la galanterie française:
après vous, je vous en prie.
– The English version says that the English
commanding officer advanced towards the French
line, took off his hat, and issued the opposite
invitation.
– Now, which language did he do it in?
• In French, the language of European diplomacy
and culture at the time?
Messieurs les Français, tirez les premiers!
• or in English
The French gentlemen have the first shot.
– In either case, it is reported as an example of
English polite sociability
"we must give the chaps a chance"
• Both versions are, of course, highly improbable
because the English would most likely not have
understood French, nor the French Franglais or
English.
• But there may be a straightforward explanation of the
legend, having to do with the atmospheric conditions
of a French locality so close to the English Channel
dans le Nord, où il y a de la pluie et du brouillard tout
anglais
the commanding French officer may suddenly have
seen the English soldiers emerging from the fog and
shouted to the French Guards
Messieurs!... Les Anglais!... Tirez les premiers!
• So, the legendary French utterance at the battle of
Fontenoy
– is not a listener address to the English, followed by
an invitation to act,
– but a listener appeal to the French, followed by an
admonition, which is in turn followed by a
command
– and the whole utterance expresses serious concern
over a negative, life-threatening experience
• The difference of this version from the first one lies
– not just in number and strength of break indices and
phonetic properties at the phrasal boundaries
– but also in the pressed breathy phonation running
through the whole utterance
– as well as in the accent d'insistance on "tirez",
lengthening the voiceless initial consonant
– all converging to create 'negative intensification',
i.e. an emphatic accentuation for the expression of
negative experience
– without these phonation and intensification features,
the utterance would not be decodable as intended,
even if it is broken up into 3 prosodic phrases
• This is an analysis in the framework of communicative
phonetic science
– it does not start from formal syntactic structures of
'address + (elliptic phrase +) imperative construction'
and formal AM phonological categories of pitch and
phrase accents, and boundary tones
• then linking the two
• and substantiating them with phonetic
measurement
– instead, it starts from communicative functions
• of listener address + invitation to act
• or of listener appeal + admonition + command in
the context of 'negative intensification'
• and looks at the ways they are coded by bundles of
sound properties
• not just at phrase boundaries but through phrases:
dual vs. triple chunking is not sufficient
– But the historical riddle of Fontenoy remains
– because we can get the same in English
The French!... Gentlemen!... Have the first shot!
– So, we are dealing with phonetic coding of
communicative function that goes beyond the
individual language.
– And the acoustic properties of 'negative
intensification' are typically found in other cases of
negative experience in e.g. German and English
– this is different from positive intensification
negative
positive
“It stinks!”
• Generally, prosodic phrasing is much closer to simple
chunking by boundary features
– as in French elle sortait de la forêt-vierge,
elle sortait de la forêt, vierge
– or in the English line from Yeats' Leda and the Swan
He holds her helpless(,) breast upon his breast
– or in the German line from Schiller's, Wilhelm Tell
Der brave Mann denkt an sich selbst zuletzt.
• These boundaries are signalled by bundles of prosodic
properties
– syllabic lengthening before the break
• short, not disrupting speech fluency
• long, disrupting speech fluency
– low-falling, high-rising or falling-rising pitch before
the break
– pitch reset after the break
– pause, breathing after the break, scaled in duration
– lipsmack and other interactional sounds after the
break
– glottal stop and glottalization in vowel after the break
• It is clear that with such multivalued feature bundles
phrase boundaries cannot be discretely present or
absent but have gradient variability according to the
semantic weight of separation between phrases.
• This weight is not cognitively present in the language
but is imposed by the speaker
– the language provides a flexible frame within
which the speaker can vary
– the variability reflects the argumentation structure
the speaker imposes on speech in the language
– and reflects the speaker's rhetorical proficiency
• At Kiel, we have done an extensive study of prosodic
phrasing for German in the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech, supplemented by perception experiments
– B. Peters, K.J. Kohler, T. Wesener, Prosodische
Merkmale prosodischer Phrasierung in deutscher
Spontansprache, AIPUK 35a(1965), 143-184
– B. Peters, Weiterführende Untersuchungen zu
prosodischen Grenzen in deutscher Spontansprache,
AIPUK 35a (1965), 205-345
– B. Peters, Form und Funktion prosodischer Grenzen
im Gespräch. PhD thesis, Kiel University, 2006.
• The following audio illustration provides highly
skilled prosodic phrasing for weighted information
grouping in an appointment-making task.
ja, PG2 gerne. PG2 ich habe also Zeit vom
Donnerstag, den 2. Juni PG2 bis Mittwoch, den 8.,
PG3 und von Samstag, dem 18., PG2 bis Donnerstag,
PG1 den 23., PG3 und dann wieder vom 27. bis zum
30. PG4
• The phrase boundaries are first of all determined
auditorily and then related to acoustic properties
– PG1 = weakest break, signalled by duration/pitch
features (f0 reset, pitch patterns), but no pause
– PG2 = duration/(non-terminal) pitch + short pause
– PG3 = duration/(non-terminal) pitch + long pause
– PG4 = duration/(terminal) pitch at end of dialogue
turn or followed by long pause
– PG1 and PG2 may be further differentiated by the
perceptual strengths of feature value combinations
– open research question
• The presented dialogue turn contains 3 blocks of dates
– which are separated by PG3
– within the first 2 blocks, the speaker structures the
periods by PG2 from … to
– the first block is introduced by 2 affirmative links to
the preceding turn, marked by PG2
– at the end of block2, day of the week and date are
separated by a weaker PG1
– in block3, the 2 dates of the period are integrated
into a hat pattern with a low-falling early f0 peak
contour and laryngealization
– speaker signals end of turn
• This perfect hierarchical structuring of syntagmatic
grouping, to highlight the speaker's argumentation
structure, contrasts with the poor chunking in the
following example from the same data scenario.
wo ich im Juni Zeit hätte, PG1 ich kann Ihnen das ja
mal sagen, PG2 wäre PG3 Samstag den 18. bis
Donnerstag den 23., PG1 und dann wieder ab PG2
Montag den 27. bis Ende des Monats. PG2 Vielleicht
haben Sie da irgendwann Zeit. PG4
• There is less grading of boundary strength for the
mapping of the structural hierarchy in the information
the speaker wants to transmit.
• Moreover, instances of PG2 and PG3 are located
inside syntagmas, they convey dysfluencies as a
result of wording problems.
• In French, there are, principally, the same prosodic
parameters to signal phrase boundaries and the same
gradient weighting for information grouping.
• A good example of read speech is the following
• La bise PG1 et le soleil se disputaient, PG2 chacun
assurant qu'il était le plus fort. PG4 Quand ils ont vu
un voyageur qui s'avançait, PG3 enveloppé dans son
manteau, PG2 ils sont tombés d'accord PG1 que
celui qui arriverait le premier PG1 à le lui faire ôter
PG2 serait regardé comme le plus fort. PG4
(Alors…)
• The hierarchical structure of prosodic phrasing is less
developed in the following reading of the same text.
• Although acoustic properties used in the signalling of
prosodic boundaries are the same in German and
French, their bundlings for the same weighting of
argumentation structure are most likely different.
• In particular, rising pitch patterns have the function of
internal structuring of French phrases, they need
lengthening added to signal prosodic phrasing.
• In German, the rising pitch patterns may be sufficient.
• The illustrations have shown that data must not be
analyzed blindly and indiscriminately but need to be
screened as to the speakers' speech proficiency before
generalizing to cognitive structures in the language.
• And this caveat is not only valid in the prosodic
coding of meaning but even more relevant in the
coding of rhythm, which I am turning to now.
3
The coding of rhythm through prosodic phrasing
• Although there is great similarity in the signalling of
prosodic boundaries between Germanic languages and
French, they diverge more strongly in the internal
structuring of prosodic phrases
– in Germanic, there is recurrence of accents
• manifested at positions of lexical stresses,
maintaining lexical identity
• grouping of accented and subsequent unaccented
syllables to rhythmical bars (feet)
• across syntagmas inside phrases
• compression of unaccented syllables, thus adding
to the prominence of accented ones
– in French, sequence of 'mots phonétiques'
• grouping of syllables up to last one of a syntagma
• no lexical stress, obliteration of lexical identity
inside a 'mot phonétique'
• final full-vowel syllable more prominent
• lack of compression of non-prominent syllables
• no regular recurrence of accents
• illustrations from German
– content words receive default sentence accents
– they dock at the positions of the lexical stresses
– manifesting themselves by a combination of f0,
duration, intensity, spectral characteristics
– there is a tendency towards temporal regularity of
the accentual beats, compression
– this may also be transferred into L2 French
– also 'accent alsacien'
• illustrations from French
– continuation of inter-phrasal chunking principle at
intra-phrasal level, but restricted to pitch movement
– flexible transition from prosodic phrases to 'mots
phonétiques' within phrases
• phrase boundary by pitch, duration and pause
• phrase boundary by pitch and duration
• weak phrase boundary by pitch and weak
lengthening
• 'mots phonétiques' inside phrase
– no compression between the prominent syllables of
'mots phonétiques'
• This prosodic phrasing structure is transferred to L2
– very strong French accent, with phrasal rather than
accentual structure
– much weaker accent
but still 'mots phonétiques' with lack of compression
stritten sich / Nordwind / und Sonne
not accent bars stritten sich / Nordwind und / Sonne
• On the other hand, Germanic accentuation in French
with compression between prominent syllables disturbs
the intra-phrasal prosodic structure for the native
French listener, who perceives it as inter-phrasal
– therefore, it sounds chopped
– and French speakers imitating a Germanic accent
mark the accent bars by strong prosodic phrasing
Here is an amusing example illustrating French
and Germanic rhythms
Un petit d'un petit s'étonne au hall
Un petit d'un petit ah! degrés de folles
Un dol de qui ne sort cesse
Un dol de qui ne se mène
Qu'impute un petit tout Gai de Reguennes.
(Adapté de Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames”,
London: Angus & Robertson (1968))





Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the king's horses,
And all the king's men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
F0 patterns with and without pitch accent timing
Summary of rhythmic differences
• In Germanic, we get an accentual interlevel between
the syllable and phrasal, meaning-triggered structuring
– phrase-internally, it groups syllables into feet,
– of a prominent syllable followed by non-prominent
– the former is docked at the lexical stress position
– lexical identity is preserved, but the accentual
structure cuts across phrase-internal syntagmas
– prominence is signalled by f0, duration, intensity
and spectral characteristics
– there is compression between prominences
• French lacks this interlevel
– it uses the same type of structuring phrase-internally
– i.e. marking the ends of meaning-triggered syntagmas
by prominence, signalled by pitch features
– = 'mots phonétiques' without syllabic compression
– thus there is gradience from inter-phrasal to intraphrasal structuring
• the former using also duration, pauses and intensity
– lexical identity inside 'mots phonétiques' obscured, no
lexical stress nor marking of word boundaries
• Phrasing difference to be focussed in multilingual
acquisition and communication perspectives.
• This difference is at the root of classifying Germanic
languages as 'stress-timed', French as 'syllable-timed'.
– These categories have been discussed extensively for
almost a century.
– The discussion was sensible until phoneticians
introduced the concept of isochrony and started
measuring durations in acoustic signals, with the
intention of representing the two categories by
numerical indices, e.g. nPVI.
– These measures may capture some aspects of speech
timing but certainly not the two rhythm classes
• Other Romance languages have also been classified as
'syllable-timed', but there, the situation is different
– they have lexical stress and preserve word identity
– also accentual inter-level, but Italian, Spanish lack
compression, Catalan has vowel reduction
– so, the syllabic timing has more to do with simple
syllable structures and a preponderance of open
syllables, which creates greater syllabic regularity
– difference from French to be investigated with more
adequate techniques than duration indices.
• Status of French precludes AM pitch accent model
4
Meaning and rhythm interaction
• In spontaneous speech, and even in text reading, the
accentual interlevel in Germanic languages cannot
maintain a perfectly regular rhythmical pattern over
time for long stretches
– because the organization into meaningful units
interferes
– and gets precedence over the rhythmic principle.
• But in verse, greater regularity is achieved
– and in nursery rhymes, it becomes essential
– where meaning takes second place.
• The interference between meaning and rhythm is well
illustrated by the nursery rhyme from Mother Goose
Every | lady | in this | land
has | twenty | nails u|pon each |hand
five and | twenty on | hands and | feet
and | this is | true with|out de|ceit
Every | lady | in this | land
has | twenty | nails. on |each hand
five. and | twenty on | hands and | feet
and | this is | true with|out de|ceit
• What is comparable rhythmic regularity in French
verse and nursery rhymes?
– i.e. the temporal regularity of prominence patterns
over time?
– We don't know.
– We have to find out by the study of nursery
rhymes in particular, because they are, of all types
of speech performance, the most likely to show
regularity in accompaniment of body movements.
– But what we can already point out is that verse
structure is different, with fixed number of
syllables and rhyme.
• Even if speech structuring by meaning is primary in
spontaneous interaction, and in reading, rhythmic
structuring must not be absent altogether.
– it aids intelligibility: rhythmic beats guide the
listener, allowing the projection of events to come
– so rhythm has an essential communicative function
in transmission of meaning from speaker to listener
– this is where rhetorical proficiency comes in
– good rhetoricians, such as Martin Luther King,
Barack Obama, Helmut Schmidt, Charles de Gaulle
captured listeners by commanding all the verbal and
rhythmical registers of meaning transmission
• Everyday reality looks a bit different
– especially the pool of informants linguists and
phoneticians usually dip into
• today's student population
- it may not be a very serious public concern when
academics arrive at the wrong generalizations
about speech and language because they rely on
the wrong speakers and data
– but it becomes of the utmost importance to the
general public when announcements at airports,
stations, in trains or on planes are poorly
intelligible because the untrained speakers lack
rhythmicity
English examples of good/mediocre rhythmicity
Ex 1: good rhythmicity: IViE c-rea1-m1
clear regular rhythmical beats
salient groupings by pitch bracketing
Ex 2: mediocre rhythmicity: IViE c-rea1a-f6
no clear regular beats
groupings by pitch bracketing not salient
Flug 1711 nach Paris ist nun zum Einsteigen
bereit. Fluggäste der Reihen 15 bis 29 bitten
wir zuerst an Bord. Wir möchten Sie bitten, Ihre
Bordkarten und Ausweise bereit zu halten und
Ihre Mobiltelefone auszuschalten, sobald die
Flugzeugtüren geschlossen sind. Air France Sky
Co-Partner wünscht Ihnen einen angenehmen
Fug. Vielen Dank und auf Wiedersehen.
5
Conclusion
• Linguistic, phonetic, and particularly prosodic research
need to reflect on what their goals are and on what they
want to achieve to give a message to society.
• If they want to find out how humans communicate
meaning in social interaction in cultural settings in the
languages of the world, as I think they should,
– then meaning and speech function need to be put at
the centre
– linguistic form and phonetic measurement only
become insightful if related to meaning and function
• In such a pursuit, the paradigms of AM, ToBI and
Laboratory Phonology cannot get us very far if they
put function and meaning second. or do not consider
them at all.
– We also need to overcome their outdated
dichotomies of phonetics vs. phonology and of
linguistics vs. paralinguistics.
– In prosodic research, we need to consider both
structuring principles, semantic and rhythmic, and
investigate their interaction.
– We can fall back on a rich European heritage,
particularly among Romance scholars, eg. Coseriu.
Let me conclude with a reference to
a little publication by Wilhelm Viëtor
on the need to change
language teaching and language learning,
published in 1882 under the pseudonym
Quousque tandem?
Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren!
Language teaching must take a new direction!
Prosody Research needs to turn about!
Sound Patterns of German Spontaneous Speech
http://www.ipds.uni-kiel.de/kjk/
forschung/lautmuster.en.html
Speech Communication – From Acoustic Signals to
Communicative Functions
http://www.ipds.uni-kiel.de/kjk/
forschung/communication.en.html
Thematic Issue of Phonetica
Rhythm in Speech and Language, April 2009