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Acoustics of Tone in Indian Punjabi
Author(s) -
Evans Jonathan,
Yeh WenChi,
Kulkarni Rukmini
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12135
Subject(s) - tone (literature) , syllable , voice , falling (accident) , word (group theory) , acoustics , linguistics , speech recognition , psychology , computer science , physics , philosophy , psychiatry
This study explores the effects of tone on fundamental frequency in Punjabi, one of few Indo‐European languages to have lexical tone. Previous studies present conflicting claims regarding the direction of pitch movement, the location in the word of the tone, and interactions between tone and prosodic structure. For the present study, Punjabi speakers of India were presented with a production task, based on a metrically balanced corpus. Results show that Punjabi tone tends to be most fully realized on stressed syllables, where it occurs as a significant fall in fundamental frequency. On non‐stressed syllables, tone can be realized as falling, high, or may not be realized. In some cases, syllable length plays a role in determining where in the word the pitch falls. There are implications for the diachronic trajectory of tonogenesis, which was concomitant with the loss of murmured stops in Punjabi. First, the intrinsic pitch lowering of murmured voicing has led to a falling tone in prosodically prominent positions. Second, tonogenesis in Punjabi has resulted in a privative tone system, in which syllables are either tonal or toneless, rather than a system in which there are multiple tone values, or in which most syllables are specified for tone.