Variation in the Realization of Bulgarian Intonation

The study presents the intonational phonology of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (CSB) and the BGToBI annotation system. CSB uses the following pitch accents: L*, L*+H, L+H*, H*, H+!H*; phrase accents: L-, H-, and !H-; and boundary tones: %H, L%, H%, !H%. In the realization of the pitch accents, there is often variable alignment between the tonal target and the boundaries of the lexically stressed syllable. This variability is due to both speaker-specific speech strategies and the position of the stressed syllable within the utterance. For example, when the H* pitch accent is near the beginning of the utterance, the high target is usually reached towards the end of the stressed syllable. When it is near the end of the utterance, the high target is reached towards the beginning of the stressed syllable. In rising accents (L*+H and L+H*), the high tone can be delayed up to three syllables after its original target. In signaling the information structure of the utterance, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the type of focus and the choice of pitch accent: the same type of focus can be ex-pressed with different accent types, and the same accent can signal different types of focus. For example, H* can signal broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive focus; L+H* can signal narrow focus and contrastive focus. Thematic material is not necessarily deaccented. From a pragmatic and functional perspective, four different tunes associated with the various vocative types in Bulgarian are presented: neutral vocative (L+H* L-%), insistent vocative (L+<H* L-% +long), challenging chant (L* H-L% +long), and vocative chant (L+H* !H-% +long). When the final syllable is lengthened, the vowel in it is not fully reduced, which contradicts the phonological pattern of vowel reduction in CSB.