British English Downtrends: Downstep or declination?

The aim of this paper is to shed some more light on the issue of whether the pitch or FO downtrend observed in British English declarative sentences should be analysed as the result of an overall declination effect, triggered by a physiological or phonetic mechanism, or as an intended, phonologically controlled, downstep phenomenon. Previous studies on English intonation disagree on the interpretation of such downtrends. In this paper the scaUng of pitch accents is analysed as an effect of the temporal distance (or number of unaccented syllables) between accents. 72 declarative sentences are examined. Sentences consisted of two or three accents. The number of intervening syUables between accents varied between 1 and 8. The hypothesis is that if the number of intervening syUables or temporal distance has an effect on the scaUng of accents, then a decUnation effect should be postulated. On the other hand, if pitch accents have the same scaung despite differences in the number of intervening syUables, then FO downtrends should be interpreted as the result of downstep. The results show that the scaling of peaks is not affected by the number of intervening syUables between accents and henee pitch downtrends are interpreted as the result of a linguisticaUy controUed downstep rather than a gradual decUnation effect.