Detailseite
Projekt
A comparative study ofdownstep: downstep by phrases in German, downstep by focus in Mandarin Chinese, and downstep by tones in Yoruba.
Antragsteller
Professor Hubert Truckenbrodt, Ph.D.
Fachliche Zuordnung
Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Experimentelle Linguistik, Typologie, Außereuropäische Sprachen
Förderung
Förderung von 2006 bis 2010
Projektkennung
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 25227840
The proposed research experimentally investigates universal and language-specific properties of the phenomenon of downstep. This phenomenon is central in the understanding of the actual spoken melody of many tone languages as well as of intonation languages. It is located at the interface of the phonological representation (tones, stress, focus, prosodic constituents) and the phonetic realization (actual height of the fundamental frequency; perceived as height of the sentence melody1). Three languages are investigated comparatively, each representing a different class of languages in regard to the topic under investigation: (a) Mandarin Chinese, a tone language that shows downstep as a consequence of syntactic/semantic focus; (b) German, an intonation language that shows downstep as a consequence of the phrasal prosodic configurations of a clause; (c) Yoruba, a tone language spoken in West Africa, that shows downstep in response to certain tonal configurations. Investigations of related questions on all three languages exist; the comparative investigation promises new insights into the nature of downstep in general and into its universal and language-specific properties.
DFG-Verfahren
Schwerpunktprogramme
