Word and sentence level prosody in Boro and Assamese
Funding Agency : IIT Guwahati
Principal Investigator: Shakuntala Mahanta
Co-investigator:
Duration/Starting Year: 2010-07-01 to 2012-07-09
Status: Completed
Our objective is to analyse and compare the characteristics of stress and prominence in two varieties of Assamese. The aim of the project will be to analyse these languages with a broader perspective than the one employed in Mahanta (2001). The project will be designed in such a way that both production as well as perception experiments will be conducted in order to arrive at substantive and robust acoustic correlates of stress patterns in the concerned languages. In Mahanta (2001), only fundamental frequency and duration was counted in order to determine stress. In this project, apart from fundamental frequency and duration, intensity and the values of turning points in the intonational contours will also be thoroughly investigated. In the earlier experiment, the target words were couched in a focused sentence. This may have obscured the word-level prominence of the stressed syllable and therefore the focused word may have shown up as the stress‑bearing element. In this experiment both sentence level as well as word level prosody will be taken into account. Further, the data elicited from the subjects will be both declarative as well as non-declarative utterances. One part of the project will be devoted to the understanding of stress in the Bodo. Bodo is a tone language and tones are lexically predetermined in such a way that a difference in tone can lead to semantic differences between lexical items. However, there is no study which investigates word and sentence level prominence in Bodo.