Nucleus position and tone unit length in English and Czech
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 1996 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Brno Studies in English 22 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | comparative study; intonation; nucleus position; tone unit length; word-order; corpus |
| Description | The article is a study of two prosodic features, tone unit length and nucleus position. It is based on an analysis of spoken texts selected from the London-Lund Corpus and the Corpus of Spoken Czech. The study supports the definition of tone units as the phonological realization of information chunks of a convenient size for processing by both speakers and listeners; the average length of tone units was found to be around 4.3 words in both the English and Czech texts. The examined texts, both English and Czech, contained a high percentage (almost 18%) of one-word tone units. The frequent occurrence of one-word tone units seems to be typical of unprepared conversation. The study suggests that both English and Czech speakers have a strong tendency to place the nucleus towards the end of a tone unit. The tendency seems to be stronger in Czech, where the average nucleus position was 1.4 words from the end of a tone unit, than in English, where the average was 1.6. |
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