ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Intonation and focus marking in Ulyap Kabardian

Ludger Paschen

This paper presents a pilot study that aims at establishing a model for the intonation of Ulyap Kabardian in the ToBI framework. On the basis of data gathered during a field trip in 2012, it is suggested that four/three pitch accents and three boundary tones are needed to describe intonation in four communicative contexts. Additionally, it is shown that for focus marking in Ulyap Kabardian questions, a stress shifting rule dislocates word stress to a prosodically determined position. This shift rule is extraordinary in that it is insensitive to stress clashes. From a cross-linguistic perspective, the intonation system of Ulyap Kabardian bears a higher resemblance to the system of one of the Kabardian dialects spoken in Turkey than to Russian, the principal contact language.