Publication details

Nucleus position and tone unit length in English and Czech

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Authors

CHAMONIKOLASOVÁ Jana MOSEY Bryan

Year of publication 1996
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Brno Studies in English 22
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Field Linguistics
Keywords comparative study; intonation; nucleus position; tone unit length; word-order; corpus
Description The article is a study of two prosodic features, tone unit length and nucleus position. It is based on an analysis of spoken texts selected from the London-Lund Corpus and the Corpus of Spoken Czech. The study supports the definition of tone units as the phonological realization of information chunks of a convenient size for processing by both speakers and listeners; the average length of tone units was found to be around 4.3 words in both the English and Czech texts. The examined texts, both English and Czech, contained a high percentage (almost 18%) of one-word tone units. The frequent occurrence of one-word tone units seems to be typical of unprepared conversation. The study suggests that both English and Czech speakers have a strong tendency to place the nucleus towards the end of a tone unit. The tendency seems to be stronger in Czech, where the average nucleus position was 1.4 words from the end of a tone unit, than in English, where the average was 1.6.
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