ISCA Archive Interspeech 2010
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2010

Nucleus position within the intonation phrase: a typological study of English, Czech and Hungarian

Tomáš Duběda, Katalin Mády

In this paper we examine cases of non-final nucleus (or sentence stress) in English, Czech and Hungarian. These three languages differ substantially with respect to word order rules, prosodic plasticity (ability to signal information structure by shifting the nucleus) and the degree of grammaticalization in nucleus position. Recordings of parallel texts are studied with the aim to quantify different categories of shifts, as well as inter-speaker agreement in the position of the nucleus.