Prosody Matters - Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Selkirk - Toni Borowsky
7. Phonetic evidence for prosodic word prominence in American English
Prosody Matters - Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Selkirk - Toni Borowsky
Mariko Sugahara [+]
Doshisha University
Mariko Sugahara is Associate Professor in English Linguistics at Doshisha University, Japan.
Description
This paper examines whether the head-Foot of PW has any phonetic correlates to distinguish it from a non-head-Foot even in an unaccented environment where the presence or absence of a pitch accent does not distinguish the two. More specific questions are (a) whether the designated terminal element (DTE) of the head-Foot of PW, i.e., a vowel with primary stress, is associated with longer durations than the DTE of a non-head Foot, i.e., a vowel with secondary stress (Sections 7.3 and 7.4, Experiments I and II), and (b) whether the head-Foot of PW as a whole undergoes lengthening (Section 7.4, Experiment II).