On the Phonetics of Intensifying Emphasis in German

This paper presents an exploratory study in the field of emphasis in German. It provides a comprehensive acoustic analysis for a type of emphasis that intensifies lexical meanings either positively or negatively. A speech corpus was recorded using an elicitation method adapted to yield natural-sounding, conversational, expressive speech under controlled conditions. Supporting the distinction between positive and negative intensification, two clearly different phonetic profiles emerged. These phonetic profiles of positive and negative intensification involve voice quality as well as the dynamics of the speech signal across its segmental and prosodic layers. By means of these profiles, the intensifying emphases were correctly classified by a discriminant analysis as positive or negative in around 90% of the cases. Moreover, indications were found for a third type of intensifying emphasis, which was called ‘reinforcement’. Its multidimensional phonetic profile falls in between the ones of positive and negative intensification.

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