TAI 2025

Melodic prominence of verbs in Czech spoken narratives

☀︎ Jan Volín, Adléta Hanžlová, Michaela Svatošová

Institute of Phonetics, Charles University in Prague

In spoken narratives, full verbs were recently found on occasion deaccented despite their central syntactic role. Deaccenting appeared to be linked with the information status of the verbs. In the current study, we ask how often the accented ones are more/less prominent in their f0 values relative to their prosodic neighbors. Narratives spoken by 16 speakers provided 473 cases of phrase-internal verbs (position typical of Czech). We used several f0 metrics and analyzed them considering the phonological status of the accents and the verb roles in the information structure. The results suggest that Czech verbs do not typically dominate. In the case of strings of H* accents, up to 90% of the verbs had lower f0 values than the neighbors. In sequences of L* accents, the results are consistent with the previous, but they cast doubts on certain practices. Importantly, classification of the verbs as thematic or rhematic brings about easier and more plausible interpretation of the results.

Cite this paper:

APA: Volín, J., Hanžlová, A., Svatošová, M. (2025) Melodic prominence of verbs in Czech spoken narratives. Proc. The Third International Conference on Tone and Intonation, 55–59, https://doi.org/10.21437/TAI.2025-12

bibtex:
@inproceedings{volin_tai_2025,
title = {Melodic prominence of verbs in Czech spoken narratives},
booktitle = {Proc. The Third International Conference on Tone and Intonation},
author = {Volín, Jan and Hanžlová, Adléta and Svatošová, Michaela},
year = {2025},
pages = {55--59},
doi = {10.21437/TAI.2025-12}
}