In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

Intonation is one of the most important issues facing performers of string quartets. Often, string students learn to play in tune strictly in terms of their own melodic line. To play in tune in a string quartet requires an understanding of the underlying harmony and how intonation can be fluid and flexible in an ensemble. This paper offers students an introduction to harmonic intonation and provides exercises to put this knowledge into practice. The text begins with instruction and exercises related to perfect intervals, which form the basis for intonation. Next, consonant intervals are discussed along with exercises for practice and ear training. Chords are constructed and practiced upon the basis of this interval practice. Student quartets are then asked to play excerpts from the repertoire presented as harmonic reductions and as originally written in order to connect the theoretical knowledge to the string quartet repertoire. Finally, chorales by J.S. Bach arranged for string quartet are provided for continuing practice of intonation in tonal harmony. It is not the attempt of this project to teach music theory or present a comprehensive study of the many issues and challenges related to intonation in string quartet playing. The aim of this essay is to provide students with a solid foundation and practical application of basic principles of playing in tune in a string quartet.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Dphil) in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, 2016 / English is a world language. The serious concern for the study and the adaptation of English to the world in general and Nigerian and South African milieu in particular started over a century ago. The study of English has been given new dimension through debates held at conferences and workshops over the issue of standard or correctness which seemingly emerged in different countries of the world. The growing divergence and convergence of English language in the world today paved way for variations in use particularly at the level of spoken words. The present work is one of the new crops of studies that attempts to identify and characterise the varieties of spoken English of our time. The study deals with a comparative study of variation in stress and intonation patterns in the spoken Yoruba and Zulu English. It seeks to identify the nature of Yoruba and Zulu spoken English and to account for the varieties that exist within the continuum. The study also aims to generate a pedagogical approach for the presentation of the appropriate spoken English inputs which is necessary for characterizing Yoruba and Zulu spoken English. The essence is to see the growing divergence and convergence of spoken English in these two speech communities. The subjects of the study were 120 Yoruba and Zulu speakers of English. The speakers were selected using a stratified random sampling technique. The main criteria for stratification were level education in English language and the linguistic group of the speakers. Two British (male and female) were used as the control. The elicitation instruments used for the collection of data were face to face interviews and materials for reading. The materials were divided into three parts: the word list, the sentence and a continuous reading passage. The three reading materials contained the target phonological variables which the researcher was interested in. The subjects were made to read each of the materials one after another and were recorded using PRAAT, a program for doing phonetic analyses and sound manipulations by Boersma and Weenink (2010). The study employed the framework of Metrical Phonology in the representation of stress. This was based on the view of rhythm proposed by Liberman (1975) and later developed into a theory by Liberman and Prince (1977). In this theory, the syllables are represented as having strong (S) and weak (W) stresses. The assignment of strong and weak nodes is determined by two rules: a Lexical Category Prominence Rule (LCPR), which operates on simple and compound words and Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR), which covers phrases and sentences. The analysis of intonation was based on Pierrehumbert’s (1980) model of intonation which supports the independence of stress pitch. In this system, intonation contours are seen as pitch accent and are described in terms of two levels: High and Low tones. The rank of difference was calculated using Wilcoxon (1985) Statistical Test. The study revealed that the spoken Yoruba and Zulu English featured more prominent syllables than spoken British English. The difference occurred mostly at the level of syllable and utterance duration. With regard to intonation, the study showed that the spoken Yoruba English is different from Zulu counterparts and those of the British. While the British used more directional tones, the Yoruba and Zulu used unidirectional tones. The study also showed that isiZulu speakers exhibited instances of vowel lengthening system while the Yoruba speakers demonstrated the tendency to use reduced vowel system. The varieties of spoken Yoruba English are different from those of isiZulu spoken English and in some measure significantly different from the British who served as the control group (see analyses on chapters five and six). The claim that high tones are associated with lexical words and low tones with structural words as posited by Well (1982), and Gut and Milde (2000) was not conclusively accepted by the data in this study. This study contends that the observed stress and intonation patterns in the spoken of some selected Yoruba and Zulu speakers could be considered as are part of ‘Standard educated Yoruba and Zulu spoken English’. The acoustic analyses of stress and intonation clearly showed that in isiZulu spoken English, syllable duration particularly the unstressed syllables are relatively longer than in the Yoruba and those in the native variety of spoken English being represented by the control group.

The goal of the thesis is to explain intonation perception and cognition, as well as the vocal mechanism and techniques, to help aural-skills instructors teach vocal intonation skills to students who struggle with intonation. The thesis explores comprehensive information on intonation perception and cognition and introduces basic vocal technique for an over-all understanding of the skills involved with accurate vocal intonation.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

Denna forskningsstudie tar utgångspunkt från oviljan att öva på sitt instrument och syftet är att undersöka de tankar och känslor som uppstår vid övning. I detta fall är det intonationsövning på tvärflöjt som står i fokus. I arbetet presenteras tidigare forskning och litteratur som berör övning, motivation, intonation och intonation på tvärflöjt. Materialet som använts till forskningsstudien har samlats in genom kontinuerligt förd loggbok. I resultatet presenteras hur olika hjälpmedel, rummet som övningen sker i och mående påverkar övningen. Resultatet berör även de känslor som uppstår vid övning och hur dessa känslor förändras under en längre tid av kontinuerlig övning. Nyckelord: fenomenologi, loggbok, intonation, övning, tvärflöjt / This study is based on the unwillingness to practice on instruments and the purpose of the study is to examine the thoughts and feelings that arise during practice. In this case, the intonation practice on the flute is the focus. The work presents previous research and literature on practicing, motivation, intonation and intonation on the flute. The material used for the study has been collected through logbook. The result presents how different aids, the room in which the practice takes place and how the wellbeing affects the practice. The result is also about the emotions that arise during practice and how these feelings change over a long period of continuous practice.

Le découpage phrastique – par le point final – dépourvu de structure verbale dans le roman de La Nausée a suscité notre intérêt pour le phénomène des ruptures typographiques. Pour rendre compte de leur prédicativité, la logique syntaxique s’est avérée insuffisante. Nous avons donc envisagé le principe de l’énonciation qui a donné à ces découpages sans verbe un fondement énonciatif et sémantique. Ce travail aurait ainsi tenté de résoudre la problématique de la prédication sans verbe en s’appuyant sur l’analyse du texte et également sur des recherches historiques. / Our interest in the phenomenon of typographical disconnection was sparked by the use of final periods to organize propositions without verbal structure in the novel Nausea. Logical syntax was inadequate to accunt for their predicative value. We found that the principle of enunciation gives these sentenses a semantic and enunciative basic. This work has tried to solve the problem of verbless predication based on text analysis as well as on historical research.