The Impact of Prosodic Position on Post-Stress Rise in Three Genres of Czech

Abstract

In general phonetics, stressed syllables are described as more prominent due to greater duration, higher intensity, less steep spectral slope and/or higher fundamental frequency. However, there are languages in which lexical stress commonly manifests with a post-stress rise (L*+H). Previous studies dedicated to post-stress rises in Czech were limited in material and/or methodology. Our current study extends the material to sizeable samples of three genres of speech: professional story-telling, poetry reciting and news reading. Over 30,000 syllables were manually labelled in terms of their accent-group status. The main focus of the study was the step between the stressed and the following syllable, but apart from the frequency of occurrence and size of the step, we also examined the influence of the position within a prosodic phrase. The results suggest that the post-stress rise should be considered a typical pitch accent in Czech, but that it does not occur uniformly across the examined genres and prosodic positions.