Towards an inventory of pitch accents for read Czech
Towards an inventory of pitch accents for read Czech

Summary/Abstract: The present article is a tentative description of prenuclear intonation in Czech within the framework of autosegmental theory, which has been applied to Czech prosody only marginally so far. After discussing the advantages and drawbacks of this kind of stylization, it puts forward a structured set of pitch accents, elementary building blocks of sentence intonation, intended for the annotation of intonation phrases. This set was derived from phonetic analysis of read speech using the criteria of interchangeability and perceptual similarity. The analysis includes information about the frequency of pitch accents in prenuclear positions and their discoursive functions. The theoretical principles explained in the introductory part should make the article accessible even for readers with limited knowledge of current prosodic paradigms.

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