The prelinguistic intonation of declarative utterances in spontaneous Hungarian

Abstract

The present project aims to analyze the intonation of neutral spontaneous declarative sentences in Hungarian, based on a corpus compiled from 300 sentences from 60 informants. In the analysis, the method proposed by Cantero and Font-Rotchés (2020), the Melodic Analysis of Speech, is followed, in which the characteristic fundamental frequency of each syllable is measured and the values are standardized. According to the results, the first unstressed syllables of declarative statements are not lower in pitch than the pitch of the first stressed syllable. Stressed syllables in the body of the utterance may be associated with peaks, but most interior inflections extend over unstressed syllables. As for the final inflection, neutral spontaneous declaratives are also accompanied by a rise in pitch instead of a fall, but such a rise is not very considerable, with a mean value of 20%.