Phonetic Explanations for Cross-Linguistic Prosodic Similarities

Abstract

Abstract A relatively wide range of cross-language similarities in prosodic patterns, i.e. not only in the final fall of statements and the like, but also the treatment of compound words, the marking of phonetic integrity of underlying semantic blocks and their hierarchy may be explained if the typical prosodic configurations are hypothesised to arise from a common archetypal, biologically related (rise-fall) contour, and from a few derived contrastive (rise-nonfall) patterns, whose characteristics may be motivated on psychological and/or ethological grounds. The rise-fall contour seems to be recursively implemented on different sizes of constituents; a rise appears to be mainly associated with the notion of beginning and uncompleteness, a fall with the notion of end, and the valley (fall-rise) with the notion of disjuncture.