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Towards a prosodic model for Tiberian Hebrew: An intonation-based analysis

What it is about

The accents are usually read through Wickes' law of continuous dichotomy, as a hierarchy of pauses. Pitcher instead reads them as intonation, using the melodies of an Ashkenazi cantillation tradition and the musical distinction between stepwise (conjunct) and leaping (disjunct) melodic motion. Her hierarchy matches Selkirk's cross-linguistic one: the verse is the utterance; ʾetnaḥ and sillûq close terminal intonational phrases, and other disjunctives whose melodic interval to the next is a fifth or more close non-terminal ones; a minor phonological phrase is one disjunctive with the conjunctives before it; minor phrases merge into major ones. This lets "pausal" forms be treated as lengthened forms at phrase boundaries, explaining their presence at lesser accents. Testing on the 4,171 ʾăšer relatives with an overt head in the prose books: 11% have the prosody of non-restrictives, 32% of restrictives, 57% are undifferentiated — close to Birkner's figures for spoken German.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 and I3 belong in 2. Cantillation: the accents (te'amim) (accents as syntax, pausal forms) and need only the accent marks MACULA keeps on each word (13-mova-tools.md §5). I2 is a point for 08-syntax.md (relative clauses) and a possible rule for the English gloss (restrictive "that" vs. non-restrictive ", which"). The melodic intervals themselves would need a small table of the accents' melodies, which we do not hold.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5842/63-0-934

@inproceedings{pitcher2021prosodic,
  title = {{Towards a prosodic model for Tiberian Hebrew: An intonation-based analysis}},
  author = {Pitcher, Sophia L.},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5842/63-0-934},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5842/63-0-934}
}

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