Transcription of Dutch Intonation

This third edition features an improved users interface.

It is fully operative, with missing functions that are indicated in the text.

ToDI 3.0
September 2026

Introduction

Intonation plays a central role in language structure and language use. Interactions with the morphosyntactic structure will lead to semantic differences, like that between (1) and (2) or that between (3) and (4). Here, the capitalized syllables have a 'pitch accent', also known as a 'sentence accent'. These terms distinguish it from word stress, which is what distinguishes the Dutch noun onderwerp 'topic' from the verb from onderwerp '1sg:subjugate'.

Example (1) is the correct reading of a sign at the entrance of a park, which carries the conditional implication 'in case you bring a dog', while (2) is a jocular reading suggesting that we should keep talking to dogs, directly or on the phone, with the aim of delaying their departure. The contrast reproduces an English minimal pair provided by Halliday (1967: 38, cf Gussenhoven 1983).

(1) U moet HONden aan de LIJN houden
(2) U moet HONden aan de lijn houden

Next, a speaker of (3) indicates that a holiday in Monaco would be much like an earlier holiday in France, Monaco's only neighbouring country. The speaker of (4) may feel much the same about the suggestion, but by not placing a pitch accent on Frankrijk reveals their misconception that Monaco is part of France. This is because the absence of a pitch accent on a word signals an appeal to a preceding occurrence of its referent.

(3) Vakantie in Monaco? Ik ben al eerder in FRANKrijk geweest
(4) Vakantie in Monaco? Ik ben al EERder in Frankrijk geweest

A removal of intonation from language use, which happens when we sing, will make stammerers lose their stammer and non-native speakers lose a great deal of their foreign accent (Hagen et al. 2011). Rather than encouraging people to sing their way through life, this illustrates the intriguing position of intonation. The topic is greatly underrepresented in linguistics programmes and language descriptions.

This course intends to contribute to filling that gap for Dutch by this interactive course in the transcription of Dutch intonation contours as occurring in brief spoken utterances. These transcriptions make use of tones, like H (high) and L (low), just as phonetic symbols for vowels and consonants are used to transcribe the pronunciation of words in dictionaries. Doing this course will make you aware of

• where the sentence accents are
• which of the language's pitch accents are used for each sentence accent
• how a sentence is divided in intonation phrases
• what boundary tones occur at their edges

It will enable you to read the transcription of intonation contours in linguistic examples of Dutch and to write these yourself (see for instance the section on Intonation in Taalportaal, vanaf release 2017).

By pitch we mean the auditory impression of the variation in the frequency of vibratory opening and closing events of the vocal folds. It is known as f0 ('f-zero' or sometimes 'f-nought') and is measured in Hz (here, the opening-and-closing events per second). The course's methodology is based on an auditory and visual inspection of the f0 of an utterance. Each exercise, which contains 12 utterances, focuses on a particular aspect of intonation contours. After the first elementary exercises, they invite you to determine which tone label must be inserted at the beginning or end of an intonation phrase (the boundary tones) and at every sentence accent.

You will quickly develop a better ear for pitch movements and for differences between intonation contours. This is done by allowing you to listen to what the intonation contour for any legitimate transcription sounds like. That is, the 'resynthesis' function will reproduce the original utterance with an artificial intonation contour based on the correct transcription, which is given in the Key, but It is often useful to provide incorrect transcriptions, just to listen to what these sound like.

In all cases, you can inspect the pitch track of the intonation contour, whether original or artificial. This will develop your understanding of how your perception of pitch relates to the way the vibration rate the vocal folds varies across the utterance. This is further facilitated by a comparison between the pitch track of the original contour with that of the artificial one produced from a correct transcription.

Your goals may be less ambitious than an ability to transcribe all the intonation contours that speakers of Dutch might use. Because the Dutch intonation system is quite large compared to that of Swedish or even French, that aim would require a sustained and dedicated effort. Since many students will have more modest goals, the course is divided into two parts. Completing Part I will ensure mastery of the three course objectives listed above, though without mastering the full set of melodic choices. It concentrates on the more usual intonation contours, the ones with H* in their pitch accents. It also covers some important regularities in the locations of pitch accents, in particular those that are rhythmically motivated.

The topic of each chapter is prefaced with an explanation of the intonational phenomena concerned. The audio illustrations in those introductions have a speaker icon and can be played by clicking on the example. You can save those sound files to disk and process them in your speech analysis software, for which we recommend Praat, which is used by our program for all operations. It is the world's standaard speech analysis package. Click the right mouse button while hovering over the example space, selecting the appropriate menu option to do this. All sound files are 16-bit, 16KHz Windows.wav-files.

The User Interface

The analysis uses three sets of tone labels, to be used for every intonational phrase. The full set is:

The screenshot below shows the second item in Exercise A1. Tone labels for pitch accents correspond to text buttons below the relevant words in the written version of the utterance. A button to the left of that text specifies the initial boundary tone, while a button to the right is used for the final boundary tones. The tone labels are either pre-specified (white) or can be chosen from pull-down menus (green).

A choice of the 'empty' symbol Ø will remove any tone label you entered earlier. Note that the symbol [%] by itself indicates the toneless end of the intonation phrase, which must be specified for the resynthesis rules to work.

Screenshot of item 2 in Exercise 1A.

• To hear what the intonation of a correct or incorrect transcription sounds like, you first press the Resynthesis button in the second row, and click the 'Play resynthesis' button when it lights up, about a second later. As said, you will find it useful to try out different incorrect transcriptions, which will clarify in an efficient manner what it means for a pitch accent to occur on one or more words in a sentence. You can see the resynthesized contour by clicking the next button, which appears below that of the original utterance if it is present.

Our f0 implementation model is a simplified version of that in Ladd (1987), which integrates the accentual downstep function from Pierrehumbert (1980. Knowing how it works is only essential once the new parameter controls have been activated, which feature is still under development.

Briefly, the resynthesis of the utterance with an artificial intonation contour requires each tone in the string of tone labels to be translated into minimally one target, with a time stamp on the horizontaL axis ('alignment') and an f0 value on the vertical axis ('scaling'). In many cases, a tone will give rise to two adjacent targets, which typically improve a tone's perceptibility. The f0 contour consists of the interpolations between consecutive targets. The initial alignments in an intonation phrase (IP) are (1) its beginning, (2) its end and (3) the beginning of the rhyme of the stressed syllable of every accented word. One target for the initial boundary tone and one target for a final boundary tone are placed at the respective edges of the IP. Other targets are defined using three distance measures. Any target that is defined can be used as a reference for additional targets.

STARTIME determines the alignment of the first target of the starred tone (T*). It is placed after a proportion of the duration of the voiced portion (vp) of the rhyme, standardly 40%. To clarify, the voiced portion of the rhyme is the part you can hum a melody on, thanks to the unobstructed air passage during 'sonorant' sounds. In the following stressed syllables, voiced portions are underlined: aan, zaak, steil, neef, berg, jasje, lende, winkel, striemen.

TOTIME determines the distance in ms to an upcoming reference point, standardly 90.

FROMTIME determines the distance in ms from a preceding reference point, standardly 100.

The f0-model determines the scaling of the targets for H and L. The difference between H and L, the 'pitch range' or 'pitch width', is defined by a parameter W. The pitch range is calculated within a wider f0 space defined by two parameters. A low reference point is given by the reference frequency', Fr, above which a normalization value N sets the mean f0 between H and L, also known as the 'pitch register'. In addition, there is a downstep factor for !H*-tones, da, which is standardly 0.7 of the value for the preceding H* or !H*, where !H* is a downstepped H*-tone. There is also a phrasal downstep factor, dp, standardly 0.9, which lowers the pitch of both H and L targets in the entire upcoming phrase, which has not yet been implemented in this version.

Graphic representation of the f0-model (after Ladd 1987, van den Berg et al. 1992).

Some history

The ToDI analysis was developed over many years, from 1981 to 1998, and formally published in print in Gussenhoven (2005). A description of British English was published in chapters 14 and 15 in Gussenhoven (2004). It featured in the earlier web-based ToDI course (https://todi.cls.ru.nl (1999-2025) CreditsToDI). ToDI 1.1 lacked a resynthesis function, which was introduced in ToDI 2.1, first on the basis of an artificial segmental signal based on MBROLA diphone resynthesis and from 2015 by means of PSOLA resynthesis on the basis of the original utterance. The acoustic analyses, the annotations, and the resyntheses were and are done with Praat (Boersma & Weenink 1992-2026).

• ToDI is not a model for analyzing and annotating the pitch contours of languages in general. It is a phonological analysis of the intonation of Dutch. Just as the vowels of Dutch will not provide an adequate framework for the analysis of the vowels of Finnish or Standard Mandarin, so ToDI will not be useful as an analytical framework for the analysis of French or Cantonese, say. As it happens, the intonation grammars of the standard varieties of English, Frisian and German are nearly identical to that of Standard Dutch, so that ToDI can be used for those languages without adaptation. It was adopted for German by Peters (e.g. 2009, 2010), for British English by Grabe et al. (1998), who termed it IViE and used it in the project Intonational Variation in the British Isles, and for Frisian by Hanssen (e.g. 2017, 2022). See here diff-IViE.pdf for some specifically IViE features.

• ToDI was inspired by two approaches to the analysis of the intonation of West Germanic languages. First, it adopted the general model developed by Pierrehumbert (1980) for the analysis of American English intonation, which distinguished the phonology from its phonetic implementation, for which she used a target-interpolation model. This means that segments, whether vowels, consonants or tones, are realized as points in a time-f0 coordinate space ('targets') and that the contour arises from interpolations between targets. Earlier accounts of intonation have assumed grammars that consist of contour sections (Fall, Rise, etc). As will be clear, in our course, the transcription is the phonology and the resynthesis is the phonetic implementation.

The phonological analysis that ToDI is based on differs significantly from Pierrehumbert's (1980). Conceptually, ToDI's analytical decisions were those of the British tradition of intonation analysis, in which a standard accent-marking rising-falling pitch contour was presented as a Fall (in ToDI: H*L), rather than as a Rise followed by low edge tones (in Pierrehumbert's notation L+H* L-) (Palmer 1922; O'Connor & Arnold 1973; Wells 2006). The first analysisis of Dutch intonation was only developed in the 1970s at the Institute of Perception Research in Eindhoven (the 'IPO grammar of Dutch intonation') and it has been useful to the development of ToDI in various ways ('t Hart et al. 1990; Collier & 't Hart 1981).

References

Beckman, Mary E.; Ayers, G.M. (1994). Guidelines for ToBI transcription. Version 2.0. Ms Ohio State University.

Cohen, A,; Collier, René; 't Hart, Johan (1990). A Perceptual Course

Collier, René; 't Hart, Johan (1981). Cursus Nederlandse Intonatie. Leuven: Acco.

Grabe, Esther; Nolan, Francis; Farrar, Kimberley J. (1998). IViE - a comparative transcription system for intonational variation in English*. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing* (ICSLP 1998), paper 99, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-583.

Gussenhoven, Carlos (1983). Focus, mode and the nucleus. Journal of Linguistics 19: 377-417.

Gussenhoven, Carlos (1985). Deze stijging is dus een daling. In: Handelingen van het Nederlandse Filologencongres 38.

Gussenhoven, Carlos (1988). Adequacy in intonation analysis: The case of Dutch. In H. van der Hulst & N. Smith (eds.) Autosegmental Studies on Pitch Accent. Dordrecht: Foris.

Gussenhoven, Carlos (1991). Tone segments in the intonation of Dutch. In Thomas F. Shannon & Johan P. Snapper (eds.) The Berkeley Conference on Dutch Linguistics 1989. Lanham (MD): University Press of America.

Gussenhoven, Carlos; Rietveld, Toni (1992). A target-interpolation model for the intonation of Dutch. In Proc. 3rd International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998). 1235-1238.

Gussenhoven, Carlos (2005). Transcription of Dutch Intonation. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) Prosodic Typology and Transcription: A Unified Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gussenhoven, Carlos, (2016). Analysis of intonation: The case of MAE_ToBI.* Laboratory Phonology 7(1): 10. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.30*

Hagen, Miranda; Kerkhoff, Joop; Gussenhoven, Carlos. (2011). Singing your accent away, and why it works. ICPhS XVII, 799-802.

Halliday, Michael A.K. (1967). Intonation in Grammar and in British English. The Hague: Mouton.

Hanssen, Judith (2017). Regional variation in the realization of intonation contours in the Netherlands. Utrecht: LOT publications (447).

Hanssen, Judith; Peters, Jörg; Gussenhoven, Carlos (2022). Responses to time pressure on phrase-final melodies in varieties of Dutch and West Frisian. Journal of Phonetics 93: 101-150.

Ladd D. Robert (1987).Description of research on the procedures for assigning F~0~ contours to utterances. CSTR text-to-speech project report, Centre for Speech Technology Research, Edinburgh(1972) Intonation of Colloquial English

O'Connor, J. D. ; Arnold, Gordon F. (1972). Intonation of Colloquium English. Hoboken NJ: Prentice Hall.

Palmer, Harold E. (1922). English Intonation, with Systematic Exercises. Cambridge UK: Heffer.

Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1980). The Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. PhD dissertation, MIT.

Peters, Jörg (2009). Intonation. Duden - Die Grammatik. Chapter 2 (DUDEN Series vol. 4). Mannheim, 2009, 95-128 [8th revised edition].

Peters, Jörg (2010). Tonal variation in West Germanic languages. In: Thomas Stolz, Esther Ruigendijk & Jürgen Trabant (Eds.), Linguistik im Nordwesten. Beiträge zum 1. Nordwestdeutschen Linguistischen Kolloquium (Bremen, 10-11 October 2008). Bochum: Brockmeyer. 79-102.

´t Hart, Johan; Collier, René; Cohen, Anthonie (1990). A Perceptual Study of Intonation. An experimental-

Taalportaal (2026): The linguistics of Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans online. Dutch - Phonology - Accent and intonation - Intonation

van den Berg, Rob; Rietveld, Toni; Gussenhoven, Carlos (1992). Downstep in Dutch: Implications for a model. In Gerard J. Docherty & D. Robert Ladd (Eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 335-359.

Wells, J.C. (2006) English Intonation. Cambridge University Press.

H*L pitch accent

The most neutral way of saying a one-word phrase like "Geschiedenis." is with low "Ge-", high "-schie-" and a fall to low through "-denis". We transcribe this contour with %L, H*L (on the accented syllable), and L%.

Here are a few examples with low or mid initial pitch and one H*L, in a variety of positions, and a variety of peak heights (prominences):

All items in Exercise 1A have one H*L pitch accent.

Pre-nuclear H*L

Frequently, more than one H*L appears in the same phrase.

Here are some examples.

Notice that the way the H*L is realised is different in final position from nonfinal position. While falls will vary in slope, in final position the fall to L is usually steep and in nonfinal position it is usually more gradual, and in fact depends on how long the stretch is between the two accents. In the first example, the stretch "niet altijd op 'n mis" contains six syllables, while in the second the stretch "heeft nog" contains only two.

Here are three more examples. The first two have two accents each and the third has four accents.

Exercise 1A

H*L close to H*L

It may happen that a non-final H*L is so close to the next H*L that it is not very clear whether the non-final H*L actually falls, or whether there is no L between the H*'s. In such cases, the contour may still sound like a sequence of two H*L's, and so we still transcibe H*L H*L L%. In section 1.7 Downstep with spreading we will learn contours with single H*'s. Here is an example with two H*L pitch accents on one word.

Here is an example with two accented words.

Final incomplete fall

In this section, we will distinguish contours with H*L L%, which fall to low pitch, from contours in which the final H*L does not go firmly down to low pitch. Such contours are called 'half-completed falls'. First listen to a H*L L% contour.

It often happens that speakers use a more gradual fall ending at mid pitch. The effect may be that the speaker sounds more tentative, or seems to express that what is said is not terrifically important. Listen to the following example and compare it with the previous one.

This half-completed fall is transcribed H*L %. That is, the final boundary is just marked "%".

Here are some more examples:

In nonfinal IPs, such suspended falls may be used just to indicate non-finality. In the following example, the non-finality of the phrase "waar rook is" is indicated in this way:

Final H% after H*L

In the examples so far, the pitch after the last H*L went down to mid or low at the end of the intonation phrase. It is also possible to pronounce a boundary H%, in which case the last syllable has rising pitch, or is entirely pronounced with high pitch.
Functionally, the occurrence of H*L H% may signal a question, as in the first example, or a reminder, as in the second, or a suggestion, which may have a ring of self-evidence, as in the third.

It is this pattern which is often misanalysed as having an accent on the last word. This is "frequent error #1". Notice that the final syllable of the next utterance is high, but not accented:

An indication of the status of the high pitch is that it remains on the last syllable when the utterance is lengthened with an unaccented word.

Here is another example. The only pitch accent is on "vraag", and the final syllable "doe" has the H%. Again, we can see it is a boundary tone by replacing "doe" with "uitspreek" or "uitgesproken heb" or "uitgesproken heb deze keer", and see how the final high tone always goes to the last syllable, whatever it is.

Often, too, the sequence H*L H% is used to signal nonfinality. In this case, the utterance consists of minimally two IPs, as in our next example. Listen to the whole utterance first.

Here is another example.

Exercise 1B

Downstepped H*

Often, H* is downstepped in falling contours. This means that the height of the tone is distinctly lower than that of a preceding H-tone.
The difference between contours with a downstepped H* and the same contours without the downstep is that the downstepped contour sounds more as if the speaker is not interested in further discussion of the point she makes in the utterance concerned. It thus has a 'final' ring about it.

Often, there are more than two H*L's in an IP, in which case each H* will be lower than the one before. In this contour, the pitch is low before each downstepped !H*, due to L.

A downstepped H* is symbolised !H*.

Here is an example with three H*L's: the second is downstepped relative to the first, and the third relative to the second.

In the following example, the same contour occurs with only two H*L's, the second of which is downstepped.

Compare with the same utterance in which the same syllables are accented, but without downstep:

In sentences with more than two H*L pitch accents, it may happen that only the pre-nuclear H*L's are downstepped: the last H*L goes all the way back up. Here is an example. (This speaker articulates his words very precisely and makes brief pauses between his words.)

Also, only the last H*L's of a series are downstepped, as in the following example.

Although downstepped contours typically end fully low, they may also be ended by % and H%. Here is an example of H*L !H*L H%.

Another example.

Downstep with spreading

Frequently, downstepped patterns are pronounced somewhat differently.

Listen to the following example.

In this example, the high pitch for each H* is extended until just before the next downstepped H*, causing a terrace-shaped contour, with the beginning of each level of the terrace marking an accented syllable. This is known as spreading of H*. Notice that only non-final H*'s are spread in this type of contour.

Don't expect to see perfectly terraced contours in naturally spoken utterances. Often, they just seem to slither down, even though the auditory impression is that of accents stepping down.

Compare with the same utterance which is also downstepped, but without spreading:

Downstepped contours with spreading can also end with % or H%, as in the following examples:

Here are some more examples, with varying numbers of accents. The first has three accents. Notice that the last one does not fall to fully low pitch, and we therefore transcribe it as a half-completed, downstepped H*L. The second example has two accents, and ends with fully low pitch.

Low pitch on !H*

The pitch of the final downstepped H* is usually very low, and may vary between just above fully low or fully low, without any difference in effect. In all such cases, we transcribe !H*, even though the final accented syllable may be pronounced with fully low pitch.

This is the case in the next example, for instance. The word "huis" has fully low pitch; equivalently, it might have had a fall from mid to low, but all such contours have the same transcription.

Missing the last !H*L

When the last accent falls on the phrase-final word, it is often overlooked and misheard as low, unaccented pitch. This is "frequent error #2". In the following two examples, the final syllables "pot" and "uit" have downstepped !H*L's.

In particular when the accents occur on the last syllable, as in the above examples, the !H*L's are mistaken for lack of accent because they are low-pitched. When we lengthen the utterances, it is in fact easier to hear the accents.

Here are three examples: "tegen", "dier" and "uit" are accented.

Exercise 1C

Pre-nuclear H*LH

The nuclear contour H*L H% has a pre-nuclear version in which the boundary H% no longer functions as a boundary tone, but occurs just before the next pitch accent. Compare the pronunciation of the following example

in which "In Amerika" and "doen ze dat anders" are two IPs, with a pronunciation in which only single IP occurs:

The medial %L has disappeared, but these two contours are really equivalent, except for the absence of the medial IP-boundary in the second example, which causes H% to be timed like the L of H*L: it moves to the right, causing a gradual rise. The L now occurs immediately after H*.

The distance between the accents is larger in the following example, showing the gradual rise quite clearly.

When the first accent is pronounced with H*L, we get a gradual fall, as usual. Notice that the intonation pattern is quite different.

Here is another example of an early pronunciation of the L in a pre-nuclear H*LH.

Exercise 1D

Exercise 1E

Transcription of pauses

It is sometimes thought that pauses always indicate IP boundaries. This is not the case. Speakers frequently interrupt their production in the middle of the IP, pause to think - apparently about what to say next - and then continue as if there had been no break at all. You may also reread our discussion of phrasing in the introduction section of the course.

Examples of hesitation pauses, pauses that do not indicate phrase boundaries, are given in the following two utterances.

In such cases you may use the P symbol, aligned with the beginning of the pause. Pause fillers, like ehhh, are marked E.

	En dan	zien ze een		hele	kudde	wilde	zwijnen	eeh staan
	%L	H*L		H*L	!H*L	!H*L	!H*L	P-E-P	L%

	Hoe	ze van die	zwijnen	af		kunnen komen
	%L H*L		H*	!H*L	P	L%

Here is another example. Listen to the whole utterance first:

This utterance has a hesitation pause during which the speaker takes a breath:

Exercise 2

Low preheads

The part of the utterance before the first accent, known as the prehead, is usually low in pitch, but may also be falling from mid to low if the prehead is particularly long. These preheads are transcribed %L.

When the first syllable of the IP is accented, there is no space for the low prehead, although frequently the pitch can be seen to rise in the first half of the accented syllable, when pronounced with H*(L). Even when this rising section is not present, which typically happens when the syllable begins with a voiceless consonant, the syllable sounds just like an accented syllable that is preceded by a low prehead which is physically there. We therefore transcribe them the same, with %L, which could thus be seen as the 'neutral' way to begin an IP.

High preheads

The prehead may also be high-pitched. This type of prehead sounds quite different from the low prehead. It is usually high level, although it may also be slightly falling. This prehead is transcribed %H. It may sometimes be difficult to distinguish H% from an accent H*.

Downstep after %H

Initial %H may be followed by !H*. The following example illustrates the way the title of a story may be read by someone reading a story to a group of children.

Falling preheads

A falling prehead is much rarer. It usually only occurs in a particular reading style, and makes the utterance sound lively. It is transcribed %HL.

%HL occurs in the following examples. They start with a fall and the accented syllable has H*L:

Exercise 3A

Exercise 3B

Types of level contours

The most common nuclear level contour is simply referred to as the level tone, and transcribed H* %. In addition to this high or mid level tone, we discuss two less frequent tone, the vocative chant, H* !H %, which consists of two or more level pitches, and the low level ('scathing', L* %). In section 5.5 we continue the discussion of level tones with the prenuclear uses of H* and L*.

Level tone

Many utterance-final pitch accents are variants of H*L. However, there also a number of non-falling final pitch accents.

One of these consists of a level tone. A level pitch accent is transcribed H*, followed by % if IP-final.

Physically, these level tones are not purely monotonous: the speaker may waver somewhat, but will avoid the impression of either a fall or a rise. Here is an example of a H* on a non-final syllable, followed by %.

These level stretches after an accented syllable can be very short. In the following utterance, we have the H* % contour twice, once on a final syllable and once on a penultimate syllable. The utterance is closed by %L H* !H*L L%.

Here are two more examples.

This example illustrates the use of H* % to mark non-finality. Notice how the speaker continues with %H, an easy thing to do, as the pitch was high already.

Another example.

Vocative chant

A very characteristic contour is sometimes used to call somebody by name. It consists of a high level and a mid level tone. The H* of course begins on the accented syllable, and the !H, the mid level, is realised on the last syllable, or on a stressed syllable, if there is one between the accented syllable and the last syllable. Often, the accented syllable and the syllable on which the !H begins are lengthened. When the accented syllable is the last syllable, the two levels are both pronounced on that syllable, which as a result is broken into two sections.

Transcription of the vocative chant (also "chanted call") is H* !H %. The pitch accent H* !H is single pitch accent, even though the !H may occur a few syllables after H*.

The lengthening does not occur when the level pitch of H* is spread over more than two syllables ("loenen te"):

No lengthening is used when the contour is used to mark continuation, which sometimes occurs in instructions which the speaker wishes to sound unproblematic.

Example:

The vocative chant is also used on utterances with an early accent, in which case each of the following unaccented words is likely to have a pitch level. These levels descend in the same way that series of downstepped accents descend. Here is an example.

As is clear from these examples, the last pitch level has mid pitch, rather than low pitch. For this reason, we transcribe the right-hand boundary as toneless: %. Vocative chants with L% and H% do exist, but are rare. The one with L% has a fully low-pitched final pitch level, and may make the speaker sound exasperated. Here is an example.

The vocative chant with H% is like H*!H % with an added rise in the last part of the last pitch level. It may give an impression of wheedling. Here is an example.

'Scathing' intonation

Nuclear low level pitch is sometimes used by speakers when repeating a statement made by the listener. This contour is used to indicate that the statement is not to be taken seriously, and hence may be termed 'scathing' intonation. If there are prenuclear accents, these too are low pitched, and if there are three accents, the transcription would be L* L* L* %. Understandably, the accents in this type of contour are very hard to distinguish, since the entire contour is low pitched, but since it is always a word-by-word repetition of another utterance, the accent positions are given by that model utterance. Currently, we have no example of this contour.

Exercise 4A

Exercise 4B

Types of rises

We distinguish two classes of rising pitch accents, based on the pitch of the beginning of the rise in the accented syllable. On this basis, we distinguish high rises and low rises.

Low rises come in a number of kinds. The high rise is introduced in the next section.

Example:

High rise

Auditorily, an IP-final high rise begins at mid pitch, which continues until a rise at the IP-boundary. Usually, the mid pitch is reached late in the accented syllable, while the beginning is low, as is commonly the case for H*. It is mostly used in questions.

We transcribe: H* H%.

High rises are frequently used utterance-internally, to indicate that another IP follows.
The following example has an accent on "praten". Listen to the whole utterance first.

In the next example, the first phrase is realised with H*H%, followed by a single H* in the second phrase, i.e., a level tone:

The following utterance illustrates a high rise in nonfinal position in IP, realised on a monosyllable.

Low rises

Low rises begin with L*. There are three subtypes: low rise with H%, low rise without H%, and the low low rise. The first two differ only at the end at the IP, where the low rise with H% has an extra rise: L*H % vs L*H H%. These two subtypes will be compared with the level tone (H* %) and the high rise (H* H%). Distinguishing among these four contours is sometimes difficult, in particular when the accented syllable is IP-final. Remember that one way of determining contours is to add unaccented syllables to the final syllable, something people can do subvocally.

After an exercise dealing with the four contours mentioned above, the course continues with the pre-nuclear occurrence of the low rise, and with the low low rise, the third subtype. This type, transcribed L* H%, begins low and stays low, until the end of the IP, where a rise occurs.

Low rises with H%

If the accented syllable with a low rise is IP-internal, its pitch is low throughout. An IP-final accented syllable with a low rise has rising pitch.

The first type of low rise rises to mid pitch (in the next syllable, if there is one), and is followed by H%, a further rise at the end of the IP.

We transcribe: L*H H%

The next example illustrates an IP with a high rise, followed by an IP with L*H H%. Listen to the whole utterance first.

And here is an example of L*H H% preceded by pre-nuclear H*L.

Low rises without H%

The L*H pitch accent also occurs without H%.This contour, L*H %, is known as the half-completed rise.

The L*H % contour is distinct from the level tone (H* %), the high rise (H* H%) and the low rise with H% (L*H H%). Like H* %, it may suggest continuation, and like L*H H%, it has a fully low syllable. Compare the previous example with the following three examples.

The L*H % is one of the many ways in which speakers indicate that another IP follows in the same utterance (continuation).

Exercise 5A

Pre-nuclear L*H

L*H also occurs non-finally in the IP. The accented syllable is low, and the climb to H may be faster or slower, depending on how far away the next accent is. We transcribe L*H.

The first example shows a non-final L*H with a slow rise followed by a final L*H H%.

Before H*(L), the same pre-final pitch pattern can be used: the accented syllable has L*, then the rise follows to H*. We transcribe this pre-nuclear rise as L*H. The presence of the H after L* describes the rising pitch up to the following H*. In some pronunciations of this contour, there is a step-up from the end of the pre-H* rise to the target of H*, which is the realisation of H before H*.

The prenuclear L*H contrasts with L*, which describes a low accent, followed by level low pitch until the next accent. This low level prenuclear accent is discussed in section 5.5.2.

We show this contour in the following examples. Those who are familiar with the television programme "Glamourland" may recognise this contour as one that Gert-Jan Drge, its presenter, frequently uses. The falling prehead, introduced in section 3.3, is typical of this contour.

In the following example, the prehead is low.

As said above, the H after L* can sometimes be heard separately. In the next example, we can hear high pitch on "niet" (the target of H) lower pitch on "te", which lies between the two high targets, and high pitch on "voer" again (H*).

Downstep after L*H

Pre-nuclear L*H may also appear before a downstepped !H*. Again, the rise may be faster or slower, depending on the distance between the accents. In this contour, the H of L*H is higher than the immediately following !H*, which has the usual mid or low pitch, usually followed by L%.

Compare !H*L with H*L in this context, as in one of our previous examples, repeated here, where the pitch on "voer" is fully high.

Low low rise

The last type of low rise is one which continues the low pitch of the accented syllable until the end of the IP, where H% is used. We accordingly transcribe L* H%. Frequently, the pitch before the accented syllable is high, usually due to %H.

Even though there is no obvious pitch movement in or immediately after the syllable "loe", this syllable is nevertheless accented, and the pitch movement at the end is a boundary tone. It is of course possible to say the same sentence with a rising contour, say L*H H%, on the final word (and syllable) "veel", with no accent on "loe". But this contour, shown in the next example, sounds different.

Some rises as markers of non-final IPs

We have come across quite a number of ways in which speakers can indicate that another IP follows. They are illustrated in the following examples, in part repeated from earlier sections. Notice that the IP-boundary need not have a pause, and that high pitch at the end of the first IP often spills over into the next.

Exercise 5B part 1

Pre-nuclear singleton H* and L*

In this section, we will look at contours in which the pre-nuclear accent may not stand out much from its environment, because the pitch continues unchanged from the accented syllable onwards: singleton H* and singleton L*.

Singleton H*

We have already come across singleton pre-nuclear H* in contours with downstep-plus-spreading. Singleton pre-nuclear H* can also appear in other contours. Here is an example of H* before a non-downstepped H*L.

Now compare this non-downstepped H* H*L contour with a contour that has downstepping and spreading, i.e., H* !H*L. Observe that the pitch fall for the final accent is earlier in the case of the downstepped contour. Both contours are informally known as the 'flat hat', but notice the difference between them.

In H* H*L contours, the second H* may be considerably higher than the first: after a mid level plateau, the pitch goes up to the final H*, and then falls. We consider the difference between this contour and one without a raised final peak to be a pitch range difference, and do not transcribe them differently. Compare the following two realisations of the same contour:

These two pronunciations of the same contour may be compared with H* !H*L, where the second accent has a downstepped !H*L.

Here is an example of a 'flat hat' with a late, raised fall in combination with a H%.

Singleton H* also occurs before H* % and H* H%. In such cases the pre-final H* may be difficult to hear (and you might argue it is not there), unless the level pitch for the second H* is a little lower than the level pitch of the preceding H*. Here is an example.

In the next example, the IP is immediately followed by a %L H* !H*L %L contour.

Singleton L*

Pre-nuclear accented syllable can be low, after which the pitch continues low to a following (nuclear) accented syllable with low pitch. In spite of the low salience of the pitch, the impression of accent can be unmistakable.

In the next example, a singleton L* can be heard on "kijken", and some may hear one on "in" as well. Notice that the contour would not be much different if we left the L*'s out and considered "kijken" and "in" unaccented.

In other cases, the low pitched stretch may sound as if there are no accents. Not surprisingly, you may be in doubt if a L* is really there. In the following example, we think there is no L* on "Marietje", but you may think there is. In such cases, just make decision, and go on to the next item.

Exercise 5C

Prefix L* or "delay"

In a particular style of speech, which is sometimes used by speakers addressing children, H*L may be prefixed with L*. This means that the accented syllable has low pitch, which is then quickly followed by the pitch peak of H*L. Because together, L* and H*L mark only a single accented syllable, we transcribe L*HL. Of course, when IP-final, this pitch accent may be followed by %, H% or L%, depending of the pitch of the final boundary.

Examples:

Exercise 6

Appended constructions

Sentences may be followed by unaccented words that do not belong to the sentence proper. There are two kinds of such appended constructions. In one case, the words are simply included in the IP, and there is no pause between them and the last word of the sentence proper. They are treated in section 7.1, where they are referred to as 'tagged constructions'. In a second type, the appended construction forms a separate IP, even though it has no accent. In this case, there is a clear prosodic break separating it from the preceding word. They are treated in section 7.2, as Accentless IPs.

Tagged constructions

The classic tag is a short word appended to a sentence to appeal to the listener in various ways. They include hè, hoor, nietwaar, toch and zeg. Their meaning broadly corresponds to English tags like is it, wasn't he, etc. Unlike these English tags, the Dutch tags are unaccented, and included in the preceding IP. They are intonationally idiomatic, and cannot therefore freely occur with all contours. For instance, the tag hè always occurs with H*L H% (or its delayed form L*HL H%) on the preceding accented word, as in the following example.

The other tags, too, may show a bias towards H*L H%. However, here is an example with H*L L% and nietwaar.

Vocatives are similarly tagged onto the sentence, and kept in the same IP. A combination of a word and a vocative, such as (Wil je) koffie, Dik? therefore sounds the same as a compound, Koffiedik in this case. The vocative need not be a name, but could be any description of the addressee used as a vocative, including expletives. Here are some examples.

An entire clause may be appended in this way, by way of cohesion marker. In the following example, the clause als je begrijpt wat ik bedoel is similar in meaning to of course.

Referents of pronouns may be made explicit as unaccented, appended items, as in the next example.

Various approximative items, like ongeveer, of zoiets, en dergelijke are similarly treated.

These unaccented tags differ from accented words that appear in similar positions, but represent different constructions, as shown by the following examples.

Exercise 7A

Unaccented IPs

In some utterances with more than one IP, there may be a non-initial IP which has no accent. Such unaccented IPs may consist of reporting clauses ("zei Jan"), or of a rewording of the contents of a preceding IP.

Here are some examples. The first has a rewording of "wij" as "wij tweeën", the second and third have a reporting clause. Unaccented IPs usually have the same post-accentual tones as the IP they are attached to. For example, if the preceding IP ends in H*L L%, the unaccented IP will have L L%, and similarly H*L H% will be followed by L H%. To indicate the close connection between the unaccented IP and the preceding IP we do not transcribe an initial %.

In the next two examples, the unaccented IP is not utterance-final; the first IP has a half-completed fall in the first example, and a fully low %L in the second one.

Exercise 7B

Exercise 8A

Exercise 8B

Exercise 8C