Intonation and diachrony: A phonetic investigation of the effects of language contact on intonational patterns

我们说话的方式受到诸如年龄、性别、我们在哪里长大以及一生中的社会交往等因素的影响。大多数人都知道，地区方言可能使用不同的单词（在东米德兰地区，“面包卷”是“玉米棒”），或者在个别的声音上有所不同（伦敦人倾向于将“认为”发音为“芬克”），但通常没有意识到语调的差异，说话的旋律。例如，在英国南部的英语中，Jack did it（杰克做了）这句话，以声音下降结尾，通常表示一个陈述，但当声音上升时，它就变成了一个确认请求。但在贝尔法斯特英语中，两种意思都用升调。因此，我们的言语模式不仅揭示了我们想要表达的内容，还揭示了说话者的语言或地区。研究这些差异有能力揭示过去和现在的种族互动。在这个项目中，我们分析了选定的语音旋律，从希腊人一起生活的其他语言的扬声器的地区。广义上讲，我们的主要目标是找出这些旋律细节上的差异如何告诉我们a）希腊人和土耳其人以及B）希腊人和意大利人之间接触的性质。我们分析的录音样本表明，来自安纳托利亚半岛（现代土耳其）的希腊方言具有土耳其特征，尽管我们所研究的人的语言不再与土耳其人接触。这是一个很有希望的发现，使当代方言成为过去的窗口：它表明希腊和土耳其社区不仅共存，而且密切互动。我们将在来自安纳托利亚半岛（继续我们为该地区开始的研究）和塞浦路斯的更大的希腊-土耳其语语料库上测试这一初步结果，以确保我们结果的统计稳健性。塞浦路斯的语调模式可以揭示土耳其和希腊在这个分裂的岛屿上的互动程度。我们还将分析来自克里特岛和科孚岛（意大利语使用者曾经居住的地方）的希腊人的语调，以发现它揭示了这些岛屿上过去希腊-意大利互动的情况。这是我们的第二个目标，也就是说，看看不同长度和类型的人口共同居住可能导致语音旋律的细微差异。我们的第三个目标是确定在所讨论的语言之间的接触停止后，语调如何继续随着时间的推移而变化。为此，我们将对安纳托利亚半岛希腊语进行纵向研究，以确定希腊语和土耳其语使用者之间接触的历史变化如何影响这种方言的语调。我们处于一个独特的位置，因为我们收集了来自小亚细亚和巴尔干半岛的半岛（可以追溯到1917年）的五代希腊人的录音语料库，这是几个机构和研究人员的功劳。我们调查的价值在于一种研究语言历史和变化的新方法。这有两个方面：第一，我们通过对口语记录的分析而不是典型的文本调查来研究百年来对语言的历史影响;第二，我们比较语调，而不是更常见的元音和辅音调查。第一种方法在如此长的时间内是不可行的，因为几乎不可能收集到这样的语料库。第二个没有尝试在传统的历史语言学框架内，依赖于比较个人的语音录音或书面记录。我们的方法结合了数学建模，语音处理和语调理论，以完善一般的语言学理论，以前没有应用的组合。从这一项目中获得的见解可以应用于其他语言，例如在加拿大法语对英语的影响或在直布罗陀西班牙语对英语的影响，最终目标是了解语言如何随着时间的推移而变化。

The way we speak is influenced by factors such as age, sex, where we grow up and social interactions over our lifetimes. Most people know that regional dialects may use different words (a 'bread roll' is a 'cob' in the East Midlands) or vary in individual sounds (Londoners will tend to pronounce 'think' as 'fink'), but are generally not aware of differences in intonation, the melody of speech. For example in Southern British English the sentence Jack did it, ending with the voice going down, typically signals a statement, but when the voice goes up it becomes a request for confirmation. But in Belfast English a rising pitch is used for both meanings. Therefore our speech patterns reveal not only what we want to put across, but also a speaker's language or region.Studying those differences has the power to uncover past and present ethnic interactions. In this project we analyse the selected speech melodies from regions where Greeks lived alongside speakers of other languages. Broadly, our main goal is to find out how the differences in the details of those melodies inform us about the nature of contact between a) Greek and Turkish and b) Greek and Italian populations. A sample of recordings we analysed shows that Greek dialects hailing from the Anatolian peninsula (modern Turkey) have Turkish traits, even though the people whose speech we examined are not in contact with Turks any longer. This is a promising finding, making a contemporary dialect a window to the past: it shows that the Greek and Turkish communities had not only co-existed, but they closely interacted. We will test this initial result on a larger corpus of Greek-Turkish speech from the Anatolian peninsula (continuing the research we started for this region), and Cyprus, to ensure statistical robustness of our result. Cypriot intonation patterns can throw light on the extent of Turkish-Greek interactions on the divided island. We will also analyse the intonation of Greeks from Crete and Corfu (where Italian speakers used to live), to discover what it reveals about past Greek-Italian interactions on those islands. This is our second goal i.e. to see how fine differences in speech melodies may have resulted from different lengths and types of population co-habitations.Our third goal is to determine how intonation continues to change over time after contact between the languages in question has ceased. To do so, we will carry out a longitudinal study of the Anatolian peninsula Greek to establish how the changing history of the contact between Greek and Turkish speakers has affected the intonation of this dialect over time. We are in a unique position to do so because we amassed a corpus of recordings of five generations of Greeks from Asia Minor and the Balkan peninsula (dating back to 1917), courtesy of several institutions and researchers.The value of our investigation lies in a novel approach to the study of language history and change. There are two aspects to this: first, we study a hundred years of historical influences on a language through the analysis of spoken records rather than the typical investigation of texts; second, we compare intonation instead of the more common investigations of vowels and consonants. The first has not been feasible in such depth of time due to the near-impossibility of collecting such corpora. The second has not been attempted within the traditional historical linguistic framework that relied on comparisons of individual speech sounds from audio recordings or written transcripts. Our method combines mathematical modelling, speech processing and theory of intonation in order to refine general linguistic theory, a combination not applied before. The insights gained from this project could then be applied to other languages, e.g. the influence of French on English in Canada or Spanish on English in Gibraltar, with the ultimate goal of understanding how languages change over time.