INTSINT is an acronym for INternational Transcription System for INTonation.
It was originally developed by Daniel Hirst in his 1987 thesis as a
prosodic
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, st ...
equivalent of the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
, and the INTSINT alphabet was subsequently used in Hirst & Di Cristo (eds) 1998 in just over half of the chapters.
Description
INTSINT codes the intonation of an utterance by means of an alphabet of 8 discrete symbols constituting a surface phonological representation of the intonation:
::T (Top), H (Higher), U (Upstepped), S (Same), M (mid), D (Downstepped), L (Lower), B (Bottom).
These tonal symbols are considered ''phonological'' in that they represent discrete categories and ''surface'' since each tonal symbol corresponds to a directly observable property of the speech signal.
Tonal alignment
The tones can be aligned with phonological constituents by means of the following alignment diacritics following the tonal symbol:
:: (initial), < (early), : (medial), > (late), (final)
The relevant phonological constituent with which the tonal segments are aligned can be taken as the sequence of symbols between the following pair of slashes /.../.
The following is an example of a transcription using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) of a possible reading of the sentence "It's time to go :
::M:T:D
Phonetic interpretation
The phonetic interpretation of the INTSINT tonal segments can be carried out using two speaker dependent (or even utterance dependent) parameters.
::*key: like a musical key, this establishes an absolute point of reference defined by a fundamental frequency value (in hertz).
::*range: this determines the interval between the highest and lowest pitches of the utterance.
In the current algorithm (Hirst 2004, 2005) the tonal segments can be converted to target points, like those generated by the
Momel
Momel (''Mo''delling ''mel''ody) is an algorithm developed by Daniel Hirst and Robert Espesser at the CNRS Laboratoire Parole et Langage, T L H L H D Bassuming values for a female speaker of ''key'' as 240 Hz and ''range'' as 1 octave, would be converted to the following F0 targets:
:: 40 340 240 286 220 273 242 170
An interesting consequence of this model is that it automatically introduces an asymptotic lowering of sequences such as H L H... such as has often been described both for languages with lexical tone and for languages where tone is only introduced by the intonation system, without the need to introduce a specific downdrift or declination component.
The particular values used for calculating the value of D and U were chosen so that in a sequence ''T Dfor example, the D tone is lowered by the same amount as the H tone in the sequence ''T L H In many phonological accounts, Downstepped tones are analysed as a High tone which is lowered by the presence of a "floating" low tone, so that the surface tone ''Dcan be considered as
underlyingly
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phon ...
* Hirst, D.J. & Di Cristo, A. (eds) 1998. ''Intonation Systems. A survey of Twenty Languages''. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). 0-521-39513-5 (Hardback); 052139550X (Paperback)
* Hirst, D.J. 2004. Lexical and Non-lexical Tone and Prosodic Typology. in ''Proceedings of International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages''. Beijing, March 2004, 81-88
* Hirst, D.J. 2005. Form and function in the representation of speech prosody. in K.Hirose, D.J.Hirst & Y.Sagisaka (eds) ''Quantitative prosody modeling for natural speech description and generation'' (=''Speech Communication'' 46 (3-4)), 334-347