Seminar I Tonal Tug-of-War: The Interplay of Lexical and Sentence Prosody

Prosody operates at multiple levels in speech communication, using shared acoustic cues such as fundamental frequency (F0) to encode both lexical and sentence-level information. A key issue in prosody research is how these levels interact: does sentence-level prosody override or reshape word prosody, such as lexical tones or pitch accents? Or do lexical prosodic features persist despite higher-level influences? In this talk, I examine these questions by presenting evidence from typologically distinct languages: English (a language with lexical stresses), Mandarin (a language with lexical tones), and Persian (a language with lexical pitch accents). I discuss how sentence-level prosody modifies lexical prosody in different ways, drawing on both experimental and corpus-based data. By comparing these languages, I highlight the diversity of prosodic strategies speakers use to manage tonal and intonational patterns in connected speech. Understanding these interactions sheds light on the flexibility of prosodic systems and their role in shaping spoken language.