A Systematic Review of Hindi Prosody

📝 Abstract

Prosody describes both form and function of a sentence using the suprasegmental features of speech. Prosody phenomena are explored in the domain of higher phonological constituents such as word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase. The study of prosody at the word level is called word prosody and above word level is called sentence prosody. Word Prosody describes stress pattern by comparing the prosodic features of its constituent syllables. Sentence Prosody involves the study on phrasing pattern and intonatonal pattern of a language. The aim of this study is to summarize the existing works on Hindi prosody carried out in different domain of language and speech processing. The review is presented in a systematic fashion so that it could be a useful resource for one who wants to build on the existing works.

💡 Analysis

Prosody describes both form and function of a sentence using the suprasegmental features of speech. Prosody phenomena are explored in the domain of higher phonological constituents such as word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase. The study of prosody at the word level is called word prosody and above word level is called sentence prosody. Word Prosody describes stress pattern by comparing the prosodic features of its constituent syllables. Sentence Prosody involves the study on phrasing pattern and intonatonal pattern of a language. The aim of this study is to summarize the existing works on Hindi prosody carried out in different domain of language and speech processing. The review is presented in a systematic fashion so that it could be a useful resource for one who wants to build on the existing works.

📄 Content

A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF HINDI PROSODY Somnath Roy Centre for Linguistics Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi-110067 Abstract: Prosody describes both form and function of a sentence using the suprasegmental features of speech. Prosody phenomena are explored in the domain of higher phonological constituents such as word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase. The study of prosody at the word level is called word prosody and above word level is called sentence prosody. Word Prosody describes stress pattern by comparing the prosodic features of its constituent syllables. Sentence Prosody involves the study on phrasing pattern and intonatonal pattern of a language. The aim of this study is to summarize the existing works on Hindi prosody carried out in different domain of language and speech processing. The review is presented in a systematic fashion so that it could be a useful resource for one who wants to build on the existing works. INTRODUCTION Prosody is an important aspect of spoken language. A slight modulation in prosody may lead to change in the meaning of an utterance. Prosody is studied at various levels in different branches of science and engineering. In linguistics, the leading branches which contribute to the knowledge of prosody are Phonetics, Phonology, Syntax, Semantics and Psycholinguistics. In Cognitive Science, neurophysiological correlates such as the spectro-temporal feature of cortical oscillation in theta, beta, gamma, and delta band are examined as a cue of prosody. Finally, engineers use these features for developing an automatic module for categorization of prosodic events. Modern standard Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in northern part of India, and also an official language of Fiji. It is spoken by 422 million speakers in India (Census 2001) and also the fourth most spoken language in the world. The syntactic structure of Hindi follows SOV word order and allows scrambling. However, Hindi prosody is less researched as compared to English and other European languages. The motivation behind this paper is the following. i. There does not exist a systematic review on Hindi prosody which summarizes the contribution of different branches of study on Hindi prosody. A summary of Hindi prosody with little or no emphasis on the role of engineering discipline can be found in (Puri, 2013). The present study includes the contribution by computer scientist as well as it has the benefit to include the prosodic study for Hindi carried out after (Puri, 2013). ii. The study not only summarizes the existing works but also elaborates upon basic nuances of prosody using examples. The rest of the paper is organized as follows – the existing work on Hindi word prosody, the existing work on Hindi intonation and phrasing patterns, and the conclusion.
WORD PROSODY The stress pattern in language constitutes rhythm. Rhythm is perceived due to the varying degree of prominence or stress of constituent syllables. This section explores the phonological and phonetic aspects of lexical stress in Hindi. Phonological Aspects of Lexical Stress in Hindi The phonological account of lexical stress in Hindi is explored by (Mehrotra, 1965), (Kelkar, 1968), (Pandey, 1989) and (Hayes, 1995). These study relate the syllable weight pattern with lexical stress. The 1 stress placement rules proposed in these studies have little agreement with one another. However, they agreed on the fact that lexical stress in Hindi can be predicted by the syllable weight. (Mehrotra, 1965) and (Kelkar, 1968) categorized syllables in Hindi into three categories based on the syllable weight. These categories are light, heavy and superheavy. The syllable weight in Hindi is determined using the following rules (for clarity see the examples in Table 1). i. Assign one mora to short vowels (like schwa, i, u, o) and two moras to long vowels (a:, i:, u:, o:, etc.). ii. Assign one mora for each coda consonant. Grapheme IPA Syllable Weight Syllable Type Gloss कक ki 1 Weak That कम k m ə 2 Heavy Less ककाम ka m ː 3 Superheavy Work Table 1: Syllable Weight and Syllable Type Examples (Mehrotra, 1965) divided the stress placement rule into two parts. One for bisyllabic words and the other for words having more than two syllables. The rules are described below (stress syllables in example below are attached with “ ’ “. ) Rule i : If word is bisyllabic: If it contains a super heavy syllable then: stress the super heavy syllable. Else: stress the leftmost syllable. Example: मकालका → ‘ma:la: /garland/ and ददीवकार → di:’ a:r /wall/ ʋ Rule ii: If word is trisyllabic or more: If final syllable is super heavy and penult and antepenult syllables are heavy then: stress either the final syllable or antepenult syllable. If all syllables are light then: stress the rightmost syllable Else: stress the penult syllable. Example: सरुकच → ‘surut i: /a name/ and
ʃ अकधिककार → d i’ka:r /posses

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