THE ALPINE INTONATION OF BERN SWISS GERMAN

This paper presents data from the Bern dialect of Swiss German from a typological perspective. Bern Swiss German is impressionistically more OalpineO than Northern Standard German, partly as a result of their distinct Odefault accentsO, H*+L in NSG and L*+H BSG. Similar dialectal variation has also been reported for English. Like Northern Standard German, Bern Swiss German can associate L phrase tones to the end of focus or to a postnuclear stressed syllable. Assuming a typological framework which recognizes distinctions between phonetic and phonological aspects of intonation as well as universal and language-specific aspects, the differences between BSG and NSG discussed here are taken to be phonological rather than phonetic. 1. TYPOLOGY OF INTONATION Work on intonation is slowly gaining ground in typology (see for instance [13]). Ladd [14] shows that BolingerOs [2, 3, 4] OuniversalistO theory of intonation is steadily losing ground to OphonologicalO theories of intonation (beginning with Bruce [5] and Pierrehumbert [17]). The former contends that intonation is extralinguistic, essentially emotional. The closest it comes to the grammar is the phonetics, meaning that any typological generalizations to be made about it are not like those made for the grammar. In the latter, intonation has a decidedly phonological component distinct from the phonetic implementation, and thereby cross-linguistic differences can be either phonetic or phonological. A sketch for a typology of intonation is given in Table 1. This is slightly modified from Ladd [14], who adapts WellsO [20] taxonomy of segmental variation to intonational variation, and incorporates GussenhovenOs [10] distinction between the phonetic and phonological levels of intonation. The first cut is between the extralinguistic N which includes some of the aspects of intonation that Bolinger considered truly universal, including communicative functions like the imparting of emotion or interest N and the linguistic. Under linguistic, the next cut is between the universal and the language-specific. BolingerOs universals are vague tendencies that all have counterexamples, but they can be salvaged with OweakO versions. Under language-specific, the next cut is between the phonetic and the phonological. The traditional distinction is that gradient differences are phonetic and categorical differences are phonological. As for phonetics, we can separate the universal aspects like intrinsic pitch of segments from the languagespecific, phonetic-y, non-meaningful aspects, such as late vs. early peak alignment, interpolation vs. spreading of static tones, possibly compression vs. truncation, and perhaps various downtrends and uptrends, such as downstep/catathesis, upstep, downdrift, and final lowering. Phonological aspects of intonation can be categorized according to the phonological form of tunes, the inventory of phonological tunes, and the meanings assigned to phonological tunes. Phonological form differences include phonotactics, tonal shapes, (e.g. monotonal vs. bitonal pitch accents or phrasal tones), well-formedness conditions on tunes (e.g. OCP effects), distribution of tunes, tune-text association, phonological rules (e.g. deletion, Tone Linking, possibly truncation), phonological phrasing, deaccenting, and so forth. Systemic differences refer to the intonational distinctions languages make, that is, what set of tunes each language has in its inventory. For instance, Glasgow English neutralizes the distinction between statements and questions ([14, 16]), which other dialects maintain with distinct contours. English and German neutralize neutral focus with narrow focus on the rightmost element, while Bengali distinguishes them with two different contours. Semantic differences refer to the meaning and use of tunes. As soon as we adopt the phonological/typological view of intonation, we practically take it for granted that languages and dialects use different tunes for the same meaning or have different meanings for the same tune. There are still numerous aspects of intonation that are not included in this table, such as discourse factors and disfluencies. page 941 ICPhS99 San Francisco