A comparative study of downstep

Researcher (planned for Aug. 2006): Beatriz López Jiménez

Project summary

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 melody'). 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.