Oh, Sei Poong . 2012. A Study on English Downstep . Language Information . Volume 15. 53-67.
The purpose of this paper is to explore
downstep issues in intonation of English. At first, downstep was taken
from African tone languages. Downstep, upstep, stylized tone were
accepted to establish intonational phonology convention. In intonational
phonology downstep is taken as compressed tone in association with
bitones in pitch accent and high phrase accent . But in ToBI system,
downstep is taken as a tonal event that is independent of bitones and
high phrase accent. This different conventions lead to different analysis
and interpretation on the same tonal event. In this paper I explore these
various issues and argue the need to unify the conventions.
(Research
Institute for Language & Information, Korea University)
Key words
: downstep, declination, bitone, phrase accent