Kurdish intonation with reference to English

Abstract

The importance of intonation has been unanimously agreed-upon amongst Kurdishlinguists. However, there is no detailed description of Kurdish intonation and its interaction with other prosodic and segmental features. This thesis is a first attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the intonation system of one of the most widely spoken varieties of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji (NK) within the framework of Autosegmental-metrical phonology (AM). The goals are to identify the prosodic structure and intonational patterns of NK and the association and alignment of these patterns with the segmental material. Furthermore, it aims at examining the effects of some phonetic parameters on their alignment and exploring cross-utterance and cross-speaker intonational variations and intonational meaning as well.

The study is mainly centred on recordings of read speech which consists of experimentally designed sentences, focus dialogues and a short story. The data is produced by 30 NK native speakers who are undergraduate and staff at the University of Duhok. The recordings were carried out at the University of Duhok using PRAAT. The data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the ToBI system to prepare the material for paradigmatic and syntagmatic comparisons.

The results indicate that the prosodic structure of NK consists of two prosodic constituents, namely the phonological word (PW) and the intonation phrase (IP). These constituents delimit the application of different language-specific phonological processes. Additionally, it is also shown that the tonal events in NK mark prominence and demarcate IP-boundaries. Four pitch accents: L*H, LH*, H*L & HL* and four boundary tones: 0%, L%, H% & LH% are recognised for NK. The results also prove that Kurdish is a postlexical pitch accent language and it is a stress-accent language in which tonal and non-tonal features are used to indicate prominence. In addition, it is found that the tonal patterns differ in their associationand alignment and are affected by phonetic features in different ways.

Date of Award	Sept 2012
Original language	English
Supervisor	Christiane Ulbrich (Supervisor) & Catrin Rhys (Supervisor)