Understanding H* and L+H* Accents in Southern British English

Abstract

The distinction between H* and L+H* has been a widely known point of disagreement in the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonational theory (AM). H* is said to encode new information and be realized as high pitch, while L+H* encodes degrees of contrastivity and realized as rising pitch. However, empirical evidence for this distinction is sparse. We examined 2,127 words with high and rising accents in a Southern British English corpus of unscripted speech. The accents were annotated for (i) f0 shape (high or rising) and (ii) pragmatic function (corrective, contrastive, and non-contrastive). Crucially, these annotations were done separately to ensure that the phonetic and pragmatic aspects of the accents were assessed independently of one another. The data were modelled using Functional Principal Component Analysis and GAMM.  Phonetically, H* and L+H* were distinct: H* was a fall and L+H* a rise-fall. However, these shapes did not map onto separate pragmatic functions, suggesting that the mapping between phonetic form and pragmatic function was not one-to-one. By separating the shape- from the meaning-based annotation procedures, the relation between the f0 shapes and the pragmatic functions of these accents is thus better understood. The functions of L+H* unrelated to information structure will also be discussed.