Boundary tones in German wh-questions and wh-exclamatives - a cluster-based approach

Abstract

We present data from a production study investigating verb-final German wh -questions and wh -exclamatives. We focus here on the variety of boundary tones found in the data. While most exclamatives were produced with falling contours and most questions with rising ones, there was substantial overlap between the two speech acts. Many utterance-final pitch offsets and pitch movements were also ambiguous in height and direction, pro-viding a challenge for manual annotation. We apply a contour-based cluster analysis to the data in order to semi-automatically group intonation contours. We show that a cluster analysis based on the entire contour can shed light on the variety of boundary tones, although some clusters are ‘mixed’ and contain both high and low boundary tones. We then supplement this analysis with another cluster analysis based on the final two syllables of the utterance, which succeeds in splitting the mixed clusters. Finally, we use the combined cluster analysis to identify and describe the ambiguous boundary tones and argue that their form-to-function mapping falls outside the scope of the canonical inventory of GToBI boundary tones. Specifically, we found late falls after high plateaus and level, medium-high plateaus that are distinct both from continuation rises and calling contours.