Upstep and embedded register levels

Abstract

This article is concerned with an interesting upstep phenomenon in the intonation of some speakers of Southern dialects of German. It experimentally establishes the main properties of this upstep phenomenon, and discusses the theoretical consequences. The upstep occurs on the nuclear pitch accent of a non-final intonation phrase. It targets the phonetic height of the utterance-initial peak, regardless of downstepped peaks that intervene between the initial peak and the upstepped peak. The findings are argued to provide unexpected support for a model of intonation in which downstep among accents can be embedded inside downstep among larger prosodic domains (Ladd 1988, van den Berg et al. 1992). In a combination of that model with an extension of Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988), it is suggested that the choice between downstep and upstep is conditioned by association to higher prosodic constituents in a systematic way.