Seifart Frank, Strunk Jan, Danielsen Swintha, Hartmann Iren, Pakendorf Brigitte, Wichmann Søren, Witzlack-Makarevich Alena, Himmelmann Nikolaus P, Bickel Balthasar
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany.
Dynamique Du Langage (CNRS & Université de Lyon), Lyon, France.
Linguist Vanguard. 2021 Feb 9;7(1):20190063. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2019-0063. eCollection 2021 Jan 1.
Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time-aligned corpora from 10 genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, including eight small, under-resourced, and mostly endangered languages, as well as English and Dutch. Clear effects of lengthening words at the end of utterances are found in all 10 languages, but the degrees of lengthening vary. Languages also differ in the relative durations of words that precede utterance-final words. In languages with on average short words in terms of number of segments, these penultimate words are also lengthened. This suggests that lengthening extends backwards beyond the final word in these languages, but not in languages with on average longer words. Such typological patterns highlight the importance of examining prosodic phenomena in diverse language samples beyond the small set of majority languages most commonly investigated so far.
正如之前针对个别语言的研究所表明的，话语末尾位置的单词发音往往比话语中间的单词更慢。本文就话语末尾和倒数第二个单词的相对时长，从这些单词被延长的程度方面，提供了一个系统的跨语言比较。该研究使用了来自10种谱系、地域和文化各异的语言的时间对齐语料库，其中包括8种小型、资源匮乏且大多濒危的语言，以及英语和荷兰语。在所有10种语言中都发现了话语末尾单词延长的明显效果，但延长程度各不相同。语言在话语末尾单词之前的单词的相对时长方面也存在差异。在按音段数量平均单词较短的语言中，这些倒数第二个单词也会被延长。这表明在这些语言中，延长会向后延伸至最后一个单词之外，但在平均单词较长的语言中则不会。这种类型学模式凸显了在比目前最常研究的少数几种主流语言更广泛的多样语言样本中研究韵律现象的重要性。
