68 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
IP boundary and is notated by %. Phrase accents are not recorded with any
special diacritic. To illustrate P&H’s notation system their notation in (25)
appears similar to the Discourse Intonation notation in (26):
(25) That’s a remarkably clever suggestion
H* H* L L%
(26) // p that’s a reMARkably clever suggestion //In the utterance that’s a remarkably clever suggestion, there are two prominent
syllables mar and ge, the tonic syllable. The pitch movement following
ge and continuing until the end of the tone unit falls. What Brazil notates
as tone, P&H notate as a combination of phrase accent and boundary
tone (Pierrehumbert 1980 and P&H 1990).^19 This system allows for four
possibilities which are schematized below in Table 3.3.
As the end of the last intermediate phrase in an IP must coincide with the
boundary tone, the separate informational value realized by phrase accents
must be studied when the phrase accent occurs in intermediate phrases
other than the fi nal one in the IP. P&H (1990: 287 and 304) provide three
examples.
(27) The train leaves at seven or nine twenty-fi ve
H* H* H* H H* H* L L%Table 3.3 Correspondences between Pierrehumbert (1980)
and nuclear tones
Pierrehumbert 1980 Tone movement
*LL% Fall or rise-fall
*LH% Rise or fall-rise
*HH% Rise or fall-rise
*HL% Stylized rise or stylized fall-rise^The * indicates the tone. P&H’s taxonomy of tones consists of H*, L*, HL*, H*L,
L*H and LH*. I have not included the tone selections in the chart because
phrase accents and boundary tones realize the same independent communic-
ative value regardless of which tone they follow.
^ The description of *HL% as Stylized Rise or Stylized Fall is from Ladd (1996: 82).
Wennerstrom (2001a: 41) describes *HL% as ‘a plateau pitch boundary’ which
she expressly equates with level tone. P&H (1990: 280) state ‘The sequence HL%
comes out as a high plateau without any drop at the end’.