A leur apparition, à la fin des années 1970 et au début des années 1980, le rap, le ragga et le punk français se distinguent substantiellement de la tradition de la chanson française qui demeure intimement liée à la tradition musicale occidentale et au chant. En particulier, l’expression vocale y est plus proche de la parole que du chant, et s'y révèle plus rythmique que mélodique. Cette singularité rend difficile toute analyse musicologique traditionnelle, et les analyses existantes se fondent davantage sur l’analyse du texte et le contexte social que sur la réalisation sonore. L’objet de notre thèse est de proposer une méthode d'analyse musicale assistée par ordinateur de la prosodie musicale à l’œuvre dans ces styles de musiques populaires, et ce, à partir de l’analyse automatique du son. L’extraction automatique des structures rythmiques de la voix à partir de l’analyse du son devrait permettre d’objectiver les propriétés rythmiques de la musique populaire. L’ensemble des analyses permettra d'observer précisément les relations rythmiques qu'entretiennent la voix et la musique, dans le but de caractériser et de différencier des styles de musique populaire. La période choisie (1977-1992) correspond à la sortie des premiers albums de punk en langue française et se clôt avec celle du premier album du groupe Massilia Sound System, pionniers du ragga marseillais. Quinze morceaux ont été choisis, cinq par style, pour leur représentativité de la diversité des premières productions en langue française dans chaque style. La présentation et l'application de notre méthode à des styles différents permettront d'initier l'étude approfondie de la prosodie musicale au sein de musiques vocales dans lesquelles le jeu rythmique prime sur la mélodicité. / At their appearance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, rap, ragga and punk french differ substantially from the tradition of French song which remains closely tied to the occidental musical tradition and singing. In particular, the vocal expression is closer to the word of the song, and it reveals more rhythmic than melodic. This uniqueness makes it difficult for traditional musicological analysis, and existing analyzes are based more on the analysis of the text and the social context that the sound production. The purpose of our work is to propose a method of computer-aided musical analysis of musical prosody at work in these popular styles of music, and this, from the automatic analysis of sound. Automatic extraction of rhythmic structures of the voice from the sound analysis should objectify the rhythmic properties of popular music. The analyzes will observe precisely the rhythmic relationship between voice and music, in order to characterize and differentiate the styles of popular music. The chosen period (1977-1992) corresponds to the output of the first punk albums in French and ends with that of the first album of Massilia Sound System, ragga pioneers of Marseilles. Fifteen songs were chosen by five style, for they represent the diversity of the first French-language productions in each style. The presentation and application of our method to different styles will initiate a comprehensive study of the musical prosody in vocal music in which the rhythm bonus game on the mélodicity.

This thesis is a description of the prosodic patterns in Jaminjung, a language spoken in the Victoria River District in the Northern Territory of Australia. It is a quantitative and qualitative examination of the features associated with the intonational phenomena in Jaminjung. It is based on the idea that, while some aspects of prosody may be universal, each language has its unique characteristics. In this study I will make use of the PENTA model of intonation, a recent development that places communicative functions and articulatory constraints at the core of prosody, thus providing a clear explanation of prosodic phenomena, linking phonetics to semantics. The analyses are based on carefully selected representative tokens of the speech used in specific communicative situations by the Jaminjung speakers from recordings of spontaneous speech. The features associated with the grouping function, that is, in the demarcation or organization of a string of words (or rather syllables) into chunks, are examined. Four main prosodic constituents are recognized: the prosodic word, the phrasal constituent, the intonation unit, and the prosodic sentence. They are distinguished at their left boundaries by pitch resets which increase from unit to unit. The larger constituents are cued at the right edge with F0 lowering and syllable lengthening, cues associated with finality in many languages. The encoding parameters of some major information structural categories, topic and focus and contrast are investigated. A prominence is usually perceived on the first syllable in the focus domain. A [fall] pitch target is associated with this syllable; it is also marked by wider pitch excursions and longer durations. Topics, for their part, are marked by a [high] target on their initial syllables. The prosodic encoding of topics follows a scale of 'givenness', where more given topics are less marked than less given topics. Contrast in focused arguments and topics is encoded with a [fall] target on the initial syllable and thus share this feature with focus, but they also display a wider pitch excursion on all the syllables. This last feature marks contrast as an independent information structure category from focus and topic. Declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives sentences are all predominantly uttered with a falling contour, however, they are clearly differentiated by pitch register - declaratives use lower reaches, imperatives higher reaches, and interrogatives somewhere in between.

The ability to hear is important to communicate with other people. People suffering from hearing loss are more likely to also suffer from loneliness and depression (Mener et al., 2013; Mo et al., 2005). To understand how degraded speech is recognized, the pop-out effect has been studied. The pop-out effect is the moment when a listener recognizes the meaning of degraded speech. Previous research on the pop-out effect in perception of speech has predominantly been focused towards top-down processes, such as form-based priming and semantic coherence in sentences. The purpose of this study was to research the relationship between emotional prosody and the perception of speech in varying levels of degraded speech. The participants were presented sentences with angry, neutral or happy prosody in varying levels of noise vocoding. The participants were then asked to rate the perceived amount of noise for each sentence, and if the prosody was perceived as positive, neutral or negative for each sentence. The results suggest that the participants' ability to perceive positive prosody in the sentences decreased more rapidly than negative as the amount of noise increased. The result did not show any statistically significant evidence that emotional prosody had any effect on the perceived amount of noise. Future research should further investigate emotional prosody together with emotional semantics, as an emotionally coherent spoken sentence, and the influences on speech perception in adverse listening conditions, in order to further investigate the factors contributing to the pop-out effect.

Natural speech contains a wealth of information relevant to understanding cognitive and affective psychological processes, which are reflected in both prosodic and semantic channels of communication. While differences in semantic channels have been demonstrated among psychopathic versus non-psychopathic individuals, research on the role of prosody in psychopathy is scant. The Computerized Assessment of Natural Speech protocol provides adetailed assessment of macroscopic-level prosody variables related to underlying psychological processes that have been linked to psychopathological conditions. Psychopathy is a condition that involves a number of disruptions in cognitive and affective processes, which theoretically can be tied to various aspects of speech. The present study provides a novel contribution by examining natural speech output in an offender sample in the context of a clinical interview (Psychopathy Checklist – Revised). More specifically, the present study examined variance in prosody across segments of the PCL-R interview designed to elicit both positively and negatively valenced emotional content, across high and low levels of subjective arousal, in psychopathic (n = 49) and non-psychopathic (n = 44) male offenders who were similar in terms of age, education, race/ethnicity, and IQ. Three-factor mixed MANOVAs (Group x Valence x Arousal) were conducted to evaluate differences in prosodic speech displayed by the offenders. Results indicated significant interactions between psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders across valence and arousal conditions in terms of percentage of silence, average pause length, longest pause length, average within-utterance variation in subjectively defined pitch and articulation variables, and average rate of change in articulation across speech sample. Implications and future directions for research are discussed.

This essay is a corpus-based and quantitative study on language change that has occurred during global events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Global events especially affect the English language since it is a global language. In this essay, language change, collocation patterns and semantic prosody are discussed to compare the use of language and investigate whether any changes have occurred during the pandemic. These factors are studied since changes in collocation patterns can give words new meaning and possibly also a new semantic prosody. The collocations that are two or more words that often go together and the frequency of 10 sets of words are studied in particular, since they are often used during the Covid-19 pandemic. The British national corpus (BNC) and the Coronavirus Corpus (CVC) are used in the study to retrieve information on collocational patterns. By using the two corpora, it is possible to investigate the collocations during the pandemic by using CVC, and BNC for a comparison to the collocational use before the pandemic. This is done by using the collocate function in the corpora and investigating the collocates of two words on either side of the node. The major findings from the research reported in this essay show that many of the words have received additional meaning during the pandemic through their collocations, and they are most commonly neutral in semantic prosody.

Speakers break their otherwise continuous speech stream into meaningful segments, the edges of which are marked by audible cues such as pauses, rate changes and pitch movement. Prosodic boundaries, as these segment edges and the cues marking them are known, play a role critical to language processing and spoken language acquisition. While great progress has been made in quantifying the complicated range of acoustic cues that mark boundaries, little is understood about the cognitive processes by which these cues guide linguistic interpretation. Further, while prosodic boundary measures typically treat critical cues from pitch and timing independently, evidence suggests that pitch and timing are perceptually interdependent. In fact, pitch factors may at times distort perceived duration. This dissertation presents 3 pairs of perception experiments investigating pitch-­time interaction, including putative distortion of perceived duration from dynamic pitch and cross-‑silence pitch jumps (i.e., the kappa effect). Each pair uses the same set of stimuli, resynthesized with crossed continua of pitch and timing manipulations, in two different tasks: one psychoacoustic judgment of duration, and one of linguistic interpretation. Results suggest that perceptual interaction of major cues from timing (preboundary lengthening and pauses) and pitch (edge tones and reset) can be analyzed as reflecting gestalt-­like grouping principles (proximity, similarity and continuity) that have been shown to play a role in perceptual grouping in other cognitive domains, including vision and non-speech auditory perception. In addition to these potentially more cognitive­‐general principles, a new role is introduced for learned and potentially language-­specific patterns to prosodic grouping, in particular intonational schemas, i.e., recognizable cross-­phrase pitch patterns. Beyond this, results also support the hypothesis that perceived grouping is the driving force behind several types of pitch­based auditory illusions, including the auditory kappa effect. This dissertation offers insights into why prosodic boundaries are expressed with the particular pitch and timing cues that are common cross-­linguistically. While much language form is arbitrary, the expression of grouping by way of acoustic cues appears to be much less so. This research has potential toexplain the perceptual foundations of boundary cues, and therefore the cross-­linguistic similarities of prosodic grouping cues.

Although the complexity of prosody is widely recognised, there is a lack of widely-accepted descriptive standards for prosodic phenomena. This situation has become particularly noticeable with the development of increasingly capable text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Such systems require detailed prosodic models to sound natural. For the languages of Southern Africa, the deficiencies in our modelling capabilities are acute. Little work of a quantitative nature has been published for the languages of the Nguni family (such as isiZulu and isiXhosa), and there are significant contradictions and imprecisions in the literature on this topic. We have therefore embarked on a programme aimed at understanding the relationship between linguistic and physical variables of a prosodic nature in this family of languages. We then use the information/knowledge gathered to build intonation models for isiZulu and isiXhosa as representatives of the Nguni languages. Firstly, we need to extract physical measurements from the voice recordings of the Nguni family of languages. A number of pitch tracking algorithms have been developed; however, to our knowledge, these algorithms have not been evaluated formally on a Nguni language. In order to decide on an appropriate algorithm for further analysis, evaluations have been performed on two stateof- the-art algorithms namely the Praat pitch tracker and Yin (developed by Alain de Cheveingn´e). Praat’s pitch tracker algorithm performs somewhat better than Yin in terms of gross and fine errors and we use this algorithm for the rest of our analysis.<./p> For South African languages the task of building an intonation model is complicated by the lack of intonation resources available. We describe the methodology used for developing a generalpurpose intonation corpus and the various methods implemented to extract relevant features such as fundamental frequency, intensity and duration from the spoken utterances of these languages. In order to understand how the ‘expected’ intonation relates to the actual measured characteristics extracted, we developed two different statistical approaches to build intonation models for isiZulu and isiXhosa. The first is based on straightforward statistical techniques and the second uses a classifier. Both intonation models built produce fairly good accuracy for our isiZulu and isiXhosa sets of data. The neural network classifier used produces slightly better results for both sets of data than the statistical method. The classification model is also more robust and can easily learn from the training data. We show that it is possible to build fairly good intonation models for these languages using different approaches, and that intensity and fundamental frequency are comparable in predictive value for the ascribed tone. / Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Computer Science / MSc / unrestricted

This thesis provides a detailed description and analysis of the Mankiyali phonology, a hitherto undocumented and endangered language of northern Pakistan. The language is spoken by about 500 people in a remote mountainous area in the Mansehra district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan. The data contained herein is a result of first-hand fieldwork with native Mankiyali speakers between 2019 and 2021. Data collection methods include recordings of naturally occurring discourse (e.g., stories, poems, conversations) and elicitation sessions with native speaker consultants. Topics covered in the thesis include an account of Mankiyali's phonemic inventory, phonotactics, a description of some phonological processes, minimal word constraints, and word stress placement.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第20474号 / 人博第824号 / 新制||人||197(附属図書館) / 28||人博||824(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻 / (主査)教授 桂山 康司, 教授 水野 眞理, 准教授 池田 寛子, 教授 長畑 明利 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

Although Alfred Tennyson's 1850 elegy, In Memoriam, has long been regarded for the quality of its grief and its doubt, the deepened sense of struggle and doubt produced by his allusions to Horace in both the matter and the meter of the poem have not been considered. Attending to both syntactical/tonal allusions and metrical allusions to Horace's Odes in In Memoriam, I will examine Horace's role in creating meaning in Tennyson's poem. Drawing on various critics and Tennyson's own works, I argue that Tennyson was uncommonly familiar with Horace's Odes and Horatian Alcaic (the most common meter of the Odes). I explore the similarities between the In Memoriam stanza form and the Horatian Alcaic as well as their differences to demonstrate that, while he was certainly capable of more closely replicating the Alcaic in English, Tennyson suggests but ultimately resists Horace's meter. Resistance to Horace's meter mirrors Tennyson's resistance to Horace's paganism. I conclude that Tennyson's identification with Horace, but not too close an identification, serves to enhance the themes of the poem—struggle, tension, grief, and doubt—in a way that would go unnoticed without a close examination of Horace's influence upon In Memoriam.