Influences of speaker attitudes on glottalized tones: a study of two Vietnamese sentence-final particles

Dang-Khoa Mac (1) , Thi-Lan Nguyen (1) , Alexis Michaud (1) , Do-Dat Tran (1)

1 MICA - International Research Institute MICA

Attitudinal information in a spoken utterance can be lexically encoded; it can also be conveyed by intonation, including modification of voice quality. This study aims to investigate how speaker attitude affects the realization of glottalized tones in Vietnamese. A specific recording setup was designed; a corpus containing attitudinal sentence-final particles (SFPs) was recorded by ten speakers. The present report contains qualitative observations and quantitative assessments for two glottalized tones (B2, the “drop tone”, and C2, the “broken tone”) in utterances realized with attitudes of SURPRISE or IRRITATION, as contrasted with simple DECLARATION. The results suggest that there is a considerable range of intonational (allotonic) variation in the realization of glottalization, and that it contributes to expressing speaker attitude – and is not unlikely to convey other types of prosodic information as well.

Mots clés: Vietnamese; glottalization; tones; attitudes; sentence-final particles; expressive speech

Domaines: Linguistique

Dang-Khoa Mac, Thi-Lan Nguyen, Alexis Michaud, Do-Dat Tran. Influences of speaker attitudes on glottalized tones: a study of two Vietnamese sentence-final particles. ICPhS XVIII (18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences), Aug 2015, Glasgow, United Kingdom. ⟨halshs-01148772v2⟩