English intonation in the British Isles
English Intonation in the British Isles
The IViE Corpus
Speech data and intonation transcriptions from nine urban dialects of British English in
five speaking styles
ESRC grant R000237145
Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford
Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge
1997-2002
Follow-up project starting May 2003: OXIGEN
Principal Investigators:
Esther Grabe and
Francis Nolan.
Research Associate
Brechtje Post
About the IViE project
In the IViE project, we investigate cross-varietal
and stylistic variation in English intonation (IViE stands for
'Intonational Variation in English'). We are looking at so-called modern or mainstream
dialects (Trudgill 1998) and we have recorded data from
nine urban varieties of English spoken in the British Isles.
Our speakers are male and female adolescents.
The map below shows the locations where we have made recordings: London,
Cambridge, Cardiff, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast in
Northern Ireland and Dublin in the Republic of Ireland.
Additionally, the map
shows that three of
our speaker groups are from ethnic minorities: we have recorded bilingual
Punjabi/English speakers, bilingual Welsh/English speakers and speakers
of Carribean descent.
Listen to some Examples
Aims and Objectives
(1) to set up the IViE corpus: to record and make available a corpus of
prosodically labelled speech data from several varieties of English spoken
in the British Isles in a range of speaking styles.
- The speech data from the IViE corpus was released in July 2001
(Progress report).
- The corpus contains approximately 36 hours of speech,
and the data are available
to the research community free of charge. After the release, 70
CD-ROM versions of the
corpus were requested and supplied. We do
not have funds to make additional copies. To meet
further requests, we have set up an an on-line version of the corpus.
- Users have two options: (1) they can
download
the complete corpus or subsections of the corpus
sorted by variety and speaking style, and (2) they can
search
the corpus
for individual files and listen to the files over the internet. Individual
files can then be saved to the user's disk space.
- A balance subset of data in the corpus have been prosodically labelled.
Audio files, f0 files and transcriptions can be downloaded
here.
(2) to describe selected aspects of prosodic variation in the IViE corpus.
We took the following steps to achieve this aim:
-
We've developed a prosodic transcription system that allows for
directly comparable prosodic transcriptions of several
varieties of English at several levels of prosodic structure
(IViE = Intonational Variation in English, levels of prosodic structure:
phonology of intonation, phonetic realisation, location of prominent
syllables)
-
Publications on the IViE system are listed here.
-
A labelling guide for the system is available
here .
-
We have labelled approximately 4 hours of speech data in the corpus. A balanced
subset is
available
on-line, free of charge. The transcribed corpus on-line contains
one hour of labelled speech data.
- We have published our findigs in a number of research
papers. A preliminary selection of findings is available
here . Some of these have now appeared in our publications.
The funding period for the IViE project ended in March 2002. Since then,
the project has been rated 'outstanding' by ESRC evaluators.
More about the IViE Project
Introduction to Cross-Varietal Work on Intonation
Varieties of English in the IViE Corpus
Speaking Styles and Examples
Prosodic Annotation
Progress Reports
Output from the Project
Literature on Intonation in
the British Isles
Links to Related Projects
Introduction
Intonation is investigated from a number of angles. For instance, researchers look
at intonational meaning, the role of intonation in
discourse, intonation synthesis, focus structure,
acoustic structure and phonology. The IViE project is about
intonational structure: the phonology and acoustic-phonetic realisation of
intonation. The data base we have collected allow for other types of
investigations also, and we are planning to work on non-structural aspects of
intonation in due course. In the present project, we aim to provide
the phonological and phonetic basis for such investigations.
Our approach to cross-varietal intonational phonology
Phonological analyses of intonation are not directly comparable to
phonological analyses of segmental structure. First of all, in intonation
analysis, we do not have an equivalent of the minimal pair test. Consequently,
it can be difficult to be sure whether we are dealing with two instances of the
same intonation contour or two different contours. The motivation behind a
speaker's choice of a particular intonation contours is not easy to establish
either. His/her choice depends on the text, the context, and his/her communicative intent.
Finally, the acoustic-phonetic realisation of a particular intonation
contour changes. Instances of the same phonological entity can look rather different
in F0 on different texts.
A consequence of the difficulties inherent in
intonation analysis is that analysts disagree on the
number of distinctive contours we find in different languages or varieties.
Disagreements can be resolved only if we have sufficient
information about (a) the acoustic-phonetic
realisation of intonation and (b) the contribution of intonation
to different utterances. Work on both areas of intonation analysis
is currently in progress within the field, and the IViE corpus is intended to allow
for both types of investigations.
The absence of generally agreed criteria for phonological category membership
in intonation prompted us to take a comparative
approach to intonation analysis. The IViE data allow for
three kinds of comparisons:
- Comparisons of intonation contours produced on directly comparable data,
(i.e.
on the same text and in the same context, by different speakers).
- Comparisons of intonation contours across speaking styles. The same speaker
takes part in a battery of tasks.
- Comparisons of intonation contours across nine urban
dialects of English, in a range of speaking styles.
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Urban Varieties of English in the IViE Corpus
We have recorded directly comparable samples of
speech from nine urban varieties of English spoken in the British Isles
(approximately 40 hours of speech). The recordings were made in:
- London (speakers of West Indian descent)
- Cambridge
- Cardiff (bilingual Welsh-English speakers)
- Leeds
- Bradford (bilingual Punjabi-English speakers)
- Liverpool
- Newcastle
- Belfast
- Dublin
The data were collected in urban secondary schools, and the speakers were
16 years old at the time of recording.
Twelve speakers were chosen from each variety (six male, six female)
and all speakers took part in the same battery of tasks. The tasks were designed to elicit comparable
data in five speaking styles.
Experimenters
Kimberley Farrar made recordings in Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle and Dublin.
Brechtje Post recorded the data from Bradford, London and Cardiff.
Catherine Sangster recorded the data from Liverpool. The Belfast
recordings were made by Orla Lowry. Farrar, Post and Sangster speak Southern
Standard British English. Post is a native speaker of Dutch.
Lowry is from Belfast. Prior to the recordings, the experimenters explained to the
subjects how to carry out the non-interactive tasks. In the interactive tasks, subjects
spoke to each other. The experimenter remained in the recording room during the recordings.
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Speaking Styles and Examples
We recorded the following types of data:
(1) Conversations
Face-to-face, single-sex pairs, recodings made in local school in a quiet room, speakers
know each other. Some pairs are close friends, but not all.
Topic of conversation: smoking. Complete conversations last between 2 and 5 minutes.
The extracts below are shorter.
A selection of examples from:
(2) Goal directed interactions
An adaptation of the
Map task (i.e. we made our own map): 'find your way around a small town'.
Click here to see Map 1 (instruction giver)
and here to see Map 2 (instruction follower).
Examples from:
(3) Story telling from memory
The fairy tale Cinderella; examples from:
We have also recorded a set of directly comparable data:
(4) A read passage of speech
Cinderella; example of opening lines from:
(5) Phonetically controlled sentences
A variety of grammatical structures; example of statements from:
For more information on the stimuli, click here
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Prosodic Annotation
We have designed a machine-readable
prosodic labelling system for the IViE database.
It is called IViE (pronounced
like the woman's name
Ivy), and the acronym stands for 'Intonational
Variation in English'. Here is a
snapshot of an IViE transcription.
The IViE Labelling Guide.
IViE is a two-tone system, and transcriptions are
made using H and L symbols associated with stressed syllables and intonation phrase
boundaries.
The IViE system differs from other two-tone system in that it is intended specifically for
the transcription of intonation variation. Prosodic transcriptions are made
on three separate tiers: one for phonological variation, one for phonetic variation
and one for variation in the location of stressed syllables. The tonal system is based on
work by Gussenhoven 1984,
Grabe 1998a and the
ToBI
system for prosodic labelling. The symbols on the IViE tone tier are similar to those
given in the
ToDI system.
A complete IViE transcription provides the user with information about
(1) the location of word boundaries
(2) the location of rhythmic prominences
(3) the acoustic-phonetic targets observed in the fundamental frequency trace (NB - tone targets are transcribed auditorily if F0 tracking is not possible or
if there are tracking errors)
(4) an autosegmental-metrical phonological analysis. A
pool of tone labels allows for the transcription of several different
varieties of one language in a single transcription system.
The IViE transcription system can be used in conjunction with xwaves,
PitchWorks or
PRAAT
or wavesurfer. We work with xwaves,
and we use customised
labelling scripts which allows us to listen to the speech, look at the F0 trace and
a spectrogram, if needed. Transcriptions are entered into a set of labelling
templates (essentially a set of text files, displayed time-aligned with the speech
signal).
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Output in the form of publications
Summary paper: Grabe, E. (2004). Intonational variation in urban dialects of English spoken in the
British Isles. In Gilles, P. and Peters, J. (eds.) Regional Variation in Intonation. Linguistische Arbeiten, Tuebingen, Niemeyer, pp. 9-31.
Other papers:
Grabe, E. and Post, B. (2002)
.doc
Intonational Variation in English. In B.Bel and I. Marlin (eds),
Proceedings
of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference, 11-13 April 2002, Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole
et Langage, 343-346. ISBN 2-9518233-0-4.
Grabe, E. (2002)
.doc
Variation adds to prosodic typology.
In B.Bel and I. Marlin (eds),
Proceedings
of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference, 11-13 April 2002, Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole
et Langage, 127-132. ISBN 2-9518233-0-4.
A PowerPoint presentation on IViE given at the European Science Foundation
TIE/INTAS Workshop on Tone and
Intonation in Europe, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, June 2001.
View slides
Fletcher, J., Grabe, E., and Warren, P. (to appear)
.doc Intonational variation in four dialects
of English: the high rising tune. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed)
Prosodic typology and transcription - a unified approach. Oxford,
OUP.
Grabe, E., Post, B. and Nolan, F. (2001)
.doc
Modelling intonational Variation in English. The IViE system.
In Puppel, S. and Demenko, G. (eds). Proceedings of Prosody 2000.
Adam Mickiewitz University, Poznan, Poland.
Grabe, E., Post, B., Nolan, F., and Farrar, K. (2000). Pitch accent
realisation in four varieties of British English. Journal of Phonetics
28.
Nolan, F. and Farrar, K. (1999). Timing of f0 Peaks and Peak Lag.
Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 961-967.
Evans, B. and Grabe, E. (1999). Connected Speech Processes in Intonation.
Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1201-1204.
Grabe, E., Nolan, F., and Farrar, K. (1998). IViE - A comparative transcription
system for intonational variation in English. Proceedings of ICSLP 98,
Sydney, Australia.
Nolan, F., and Grabe, E. (1997). Can ToBI transcribe intonational variation
in English? In Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Intonation: Theory,
Models and Applications, Athens, Greece.
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Output
1. IViE CD Sets
We made available two types of CD-ROM:
In 2001, we released the complete set of speech data from the IViE corpus
on sets of five CD-ROMs. These
data are in .wav format.
In 2000, we made available a
beta-version of the prosodically annotated IViE-CD.
The final version of this data set is available
here, on-line.
The data can be viewed with xwaves (NB: xwaves
can no longer be purchased but is still widely available speech laboratories),
PitchWorks,
PRAAT
or wavesurfer.
2. On-line Versions of the Corpus
The complete IViE corpus is now available on-line. There are two pages for
the complete set of speech data (nine dialects, five speaking styles):
- The
search and audio page
allows users to search for data from a particular variety in a particular speaking
style and listen to the results of the search.
- The
download page
provides
downloadable packages of
files sorted by variety and speaking style (.tar packs in .wav format).
On a further page, we have made available prosodically
and orthographically transcribed IViE data.
- The
prosodically transcribed IViE Corpus contains one hour of labelled
speech data. The seven dialects in our original project application are
included (Belfast, Bradford Punjabi English, Cambridge, Dublin, Leeds,
Newcastle, London). There are data in five speaking styles; from one male
and one female speaker per dialect.
Publications from the project
Progress Reports
The final progress report
31/06/02
Progress report
18/10/01
Progress report
16/08/01
Progress report
02/07/01
Progress report
10/05/01
Progress report
28/03/01
Progress report
22/11/00
Progress report
27/10/99
Progress report
21/09/98
Progress report
03/06/98
Progress report
27/02/98
Links to related projects
Tone and Intonation in Europe:
TIE Network
Swedish dialects in the year 2000 (pages in Swedish):
SWEDIA2000
German dialect intonation project (pages in German):
Dialektintonation
Transcription of Dutch intonation:
ToDI
The ToBI system for prosodic labelling:
ToBI
Esther Grabe
29/04/2003