Footnotes for Four tones and downtrend – –
- I would like to
express my gratitude to J. Etung and N. Martin for their help
in constructing the dataset and their willingness to
participate in the recordings.
- This measurement was
taken as close as possible to the end of the utterance but
avoiding any possible ‘tail-off’ effect. In a great
many cases a tail-off was observable as a very steep drop in F0
as phonation ceased, i.e. in the last 15 ms or so of te
utterance, and was excluded from the
measurement.
- Two sentences
originally felt by my assistant to consist entirely of T4 later
proved to have a T3 word in them. A second potential source of
confounding influence on the results involving T4 is discussed
below.
- Despite being
restricted to the last 40–80 ms of the utterance, this
drop in F0 cannot be attributed to a ‘tail-off’
effect (cf. fn. 1).
- Note, however, that
Clements’ study was not a controlled experiment, but one
based one a monologue. Neither is it clear precisely what is
meant by downdrift; the usage in Clements’ paper seems to
subsume different downtrends. It is therefore not
immediately obvious that what is referred
to as ‘downdrift’ in that paper is comparable to
‘declination’ in the present study.
- The inherent or
‘normal’ level of the tone is taken to be either
the F0 value of the tone as it occurs earlier in the sentence
or, where the structure of the sentences did not permit this
comparison, the F0 value of the tone at a comparable place in
the like-tone sentences. In cases where
both comparisons were possible, there was agreement between the
two.