5 - Declination

Summary

Introduction

It has now become common usage to make a distinction between local and global attributes in intonational matters. Local attributes comprise characteristics of F_o relating to only a few syllables, whereas global attributes extend over longer stretches of speech, such as an entire clause or utterance. If we apply this dichotomy here, it follows that in the preceding chapters, we have mainly dealt with local attributes. Admittedly, the gradual movements (‘4’ and ‘D’) may extend over quite a number of syllables, but they do not cover an entire clause or utterance.

In languages like Dutch and English, the most important global attribute is the observed tendency of F_o to decrease slowly from beginning to end of an utterance. This phenomenon has already been reported by Pike (1945: 77): ‘The general tendency of the voice is to begin on a moderate pitch and lower the medium pitch line during the sentence.’

One way of demonstrating this tendency is to make histograms of (log-converted) F_o values taken every 10 ms for initial, medial and final parts of utterances; unless the utterance contains a very unbalanced distribution of local events, this procedure will show a gradual shift of the peak of the distribution from higher to lower as the sample is taken later in the utterance (see fig. 5.1).