Phonetic alignment and the phrase tone/ ‘trailing’ tone ambiguity in irish english

Author(s) :	Sullivan jennifer University College Dublin
Abstract	This paper refers to the study of an Irish English variety (Wexford) heretofore never analysed intonationally. It tackles an unresolved issue between American and British schools: whether phrase tones are necessary in intonational analysis. The ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) annotation system (designed for American English) includes phrase tones while the IViE (Intonational Variation in English) system (designed for British/Irish English) omits them. This paper presents a study of the phonetic alignment in nuclear falling accents to ascertain which analysis is more appropriate in this domain. An existing corpus of Dublin English is referred to as well as a new corpus of read sentences recorded by speakers of Wexford English.
Keywords	Intonation,Phrase tones,‘Trailing’ tones,ToBI (Tone and Break Indices),IViE (Intonational Variation