Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About ToBI

Organisator(en) Andrea Pešková (University of Osnabrück)
Veranstaltungsbeginn 24.01.2017, 09.30 Uhr
Veranstaltungsende 24.01.2017, 18.00 Uhr
Ort ZAS

Directed at anyone involved in the study of intonation, this one-day hands-on workshop is intended as a practical introduction to the use of the ToBI system to transcribe and annotate the prosody of speech. First, we will learn how the various ToBI labels for tonal entities (i.e., pitch accents and boundary tones) have been applied to languages like German and Spanish which have already been fully analysed in the ToBI system, and practise applying it to these languages ourselves. This will enable us to see the sorts of difficulties that can arise in the annotation process. Then, as a group, we will gather and develop ideas about how to transcribe and label the intonation of languages which have received much less attention within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) approach. We will start with Czech and Polish and continue with other languages proposed by the participants. 

In the process we will address a wide range of issues, both general and specific, such as: With what sorts of data should we start to analyse the language? How do we recognize whether a tonal category is phonological or not? Is a tonal event also an important cue to (lexical) stress in the language? How can we develop a ToBI annotation system for this language? Though participants will be provided with data to work on in the workshop, they are also welcome to bring their own.

Structure of the workshop

Morning sessions (9:30-12:30) 

9:30-11:00  Introduction. Presenting some standardised ToBI systems. 

11:00-11:15 Coffee break

11:15-12:30  How ToBI labelling is carried out in languages which already have a standardised ToBI system.  

12:30-14:00  Lunch

Afternoon sessions (14:00-16:30) 

14:00-15:15  Creating a standardised set of ToBI labels for a language which thus far lacks such a set. 

15:15-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-16:30  Transcribing acoustic data with ToBI.