Melodies of the majority language : investigating prosodic phenomena in majority English

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of majority and monolingual English speaker groups on three key prosodic phenomena, namely pitch accents, boundary tones and intonational phrases. To that end, the data employed is extracted from a multilingual corpus consisting of comparable speaker data with the necessary annotations. The nature of the dataset is on of semi-spontaneous narratives elicited in a semi-naturalistic manner. Three binomial generalized linear mixed effects models and one linear mixed effect model encode fixed and random effects in order to analyse the influence and interaction of various factors such as bilingualism, gender and formality on linguistic intonation. The statistical analysis performed on semi-spontaneous speech, reveals a significant influence of formality on higher monotonal pitch accent usage. The influence of gender is significant on the likelihood of a speaker using a high boundary tone in their utterance. The role of bilingualism and formality influence pitch accent placements on content words, and lastly formality impacts the length of an intonational phrase, where formal contexts consist of shorter phrases.