Phrase-initial boundary tones in Hungarian interrogatives and exclamatives

Mády, Katalin and Gyuris, Beáta and Szalontai, Ádám (2013) Phrase-initial boundary tones in Hungarian interrogatives and exclamatives. In: Proc. of the Prosody-Discourse Interface Conference 2013 (IDP-2013), Leuven, Belgium, Leuven, Belgium.

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Abstract

There is a group of wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives in Hungarian that are distinguished only by means of prosody. It was shown previously that the distinction consists in having falling pitch accents on the wh-element in interrogatives, and rising pitch accents in exclamatives. In this paper, the relevance of sentence-initial f0 is investigated as a potential trigger for the above differences. A perception experiment was set up in which sentence-initial and sentence-final chunks containing only f0 information were presented to participants, along with the wh-element bearing the only pitch accent of the sentence. It was shown that sentence-initial chunks carried the most relevant information for sentence type identification, whereas pitch accent type and entence-final f0 were less informative. The findings suggest that phrase-initial boundary tones are of relevance in Hungarian prosody.

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