Contextual Evidence for the Representation of Pitch Accents in Standard Serbian

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an experiment that elicits contextual effects on Rising and Falling accents in Standard Serbian, with the goal of determining their acoustic correlates and their phonological representation. Materials systematically vary the distance between pitch accents, inducing “tone crowding,” in order to identify the phonetic dimensions that consistently distinguish the two pitch accent types, to examine the association between accents and the segmental string, as well as the timing relationship between accent minima and maxima, and to investigate the interaction between lexical accents and boundary tones. On the basis of the phonetic findings, a unified analysis of the phonological distribution and phonetic realization of Falling and Rising accents in Standard Serbian is proposed. It is proposed that both Rising and Falling accents consist of a single lexical High (H). The restricted distribution of the two accents emerges from the interaction of stress and tone: Falling accents are monosyllabic, such that stress and pitch prominence coincide; Rising accents are bisyllabic, such that the stressed syllable precedes the pitch-accented syllable. The phonetic differences between the Falling and Rising accents follow from the place of lexically designated H, the location of stress, and the effects of boundary tones. The larger issue we address concerns the phonological characterization of tone/stress interactions. Given the two general types of interactions, one in which the place of stress is predictable from the place of tone, and the other with the reversed direction of influence, we analyze Standard Serbian as belonging to the former type. While both types can be characterized in systems of tonal phonology, which allow free interaction of tone and stress, the type exemplified by Standard Serbian, with contrastive tonal specifications governing the distribution of stress, cannot be captured in an Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework, in which stress serves as anchor for tonal melodies.