Burmese quotation intonation

Burmese is a complex tone language with five lexical tones showing multi-dimensional phonetic distinctions in pitch, duration, and phonation. It also has rich intonation phenomena on the sentence level. A salient quotation intonation commonly occurs on the last syllable of a quoted sentence. This paper presents a production experiment investigating the interaction of quotation intonation with different lexical tones in Burmese. The results showed that the F0 contrasts between different lexical tones were enhanced in the quotation context and the duration difference was partially neutralized in quotations. This phenomenon is distinct from replacive tonal alternation ([14]) and from the realisation of focus in Burmese ([11]). Our findings demonstrate how different dimensions of prosody, viz. F0 height, F0 contour and duration, depart from their default settings in a lexical tone and change independently in opposite directions for the sentence-level function. Copyright © 2019 Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.