Declination ‘‘reset’’ and the hierarchical organization of utterances

Sequences of accented fundamental frequency (F0) peaks (‘‘toplines’’) were measured for sentences of the form A and B but C and A but B and C, where A, B, and C are separate main clauses with three (four in a replication experiment) accented words each. It was hypothesized that the differences in boundary strength (but-boundary stronger than and ) would be reflected in the way declination was reset following the boundaries. There were significant differences between the toplines of the two sentence types, the most consistent being that the accent peaks immediately following the two boundaries were higher if they followed but than if they followed and . In other respects the toplines were similar, exhibiting declination within each clause and across the three clauses; corresponding clause toplines that began at different levels following different boundaries nevertheless tended to end at the same level. The fact that hierarchical organization is reflected intonationally in this way makes problems for models of F0 in which contours result from the interaction of a number of preplanned overall trends. Suggestions are made for the incorporation of hierarchical information into models that analyze F0 contours as strings of abstract targets.