ToBI

A full ToBI transcription consists of six parts: (a) an audio recording, (b) an electronic print-out or paper record of the F0 (fundamental pitch), (c) a tones tier, with an analysis of the tonal events in terms of H and L, (d) a words tier with the words of the utterance in ordinary writing, (e) a break-index tier showing the strength of the junctures, and (f) a miscellaneous tier with comments.Cooper, S. (2015) "Intonation in Anglesey Welsh". Bangor University PhD thesis, p. 29.

Tonal events include pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones.

Pitch accents, written as H* or L* (high and low tones, respectively), are typically realized on words that carry the most information in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "Mary went to the store to get some milk", a natural pronunciation would include pitch accents on "Mary", "store", and "milk". Other kinds of pitch accents include L*+H (a syllable which starts with a low accent and then rises) and L+H* (again low-high on one syllable, but with the second part accented).{{Cite web |title=ToBI Transcription Summary |url=https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/306/tobi.summary.html |access-date=2024-08-22 |website=legacy.cs.indiana.edu}}

Phrase accents, written H- or L-, are the tones between a pitch accent and a boundary tone. For example, the intonation at the end of a question might be H*L-H%, indicating that the pitch starts high, falls to a low, and rises again; or L*H-H%, indicating that the pitch starts low, then rises steadily to a high.

Boundary tones, written with H% and L%, are affiliated not to words but to phrase edges. For example, the sentence "Mary went to the store" can be pronounced as a statement or a question ("Mary went to the store." vs. "Mary went to the store?"). The contrast between the statement and the question is signalled by a boundary tone at the end of the phrase: a low boundary tone causes a falling pitch contour, signalling the statement, whereas a high boundary tone causes a rising pitch contour, signalling the question.{{citation needed|date=February 2015}}

Break indices are numbers indicating how strong the break is between words:

• 0 = clitic boundary, e.g. who's
• 1 = normal word boundary
• 2 = perceived juncture with no intonation effect, or apparent intonational boundary without a pause or any other clues
• 3 = intermediate phrase, marked with H- or L-.
• 4 = full intonation phrase, marked L% or H%, at the end of a phrase or sentence

The English ToBI standard distinguishes four or five levels of boundary strength, corresponding roughly to breaks between constituents at different levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy.Selkirk, E. (1984). Phonology and syntax. MIT Press: Cambridge.Nespor, M. and I. Vogel. 1986. Prosodic Phonology. Foris. One signal of boundary strength is lengthening of the preceding syllable: the stronger the boundary, the more lengthening of the preceding syllable.Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M., & Price, P.J. (1992). Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91(3), 1707-1717. In some versions, level 2 is omitted.

{{Reflist|2}}

• Port, R. [https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/306/tobi.summary.html ToBI Intonation Transcription Summary], Indiana University Introduction to Phonetics course.
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20130218081131/http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ ToBI – Ohio State University, Department of Linguistics]
• [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W99/W99-0301.pdf Steven Bird and Mark Liberman – "Annotation Graphs as a Framework for Multidimensional Linguistic Data Analysis"]

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Category:Prosody (linguistics)