Towards a model of Singaporean English intonational phonology

Singaporean English (SgE) is a variety of English spoken in Singapore. Recent research has sought to identify the systematic features that make SgE distinct from other varieties of English. Although the intonation of SgE has been described previously [Deterding (1994), Lim (2004), Ng (2011)], no phonological model has yet been proposed. This paper proposes a model of intonational phonology for SgE within the Autosegmental-Metrical phonology framework. Three native speakers were recorded reading declarative and question sentences of varying length and stress pattern. Preliminary results suggest that SgE has three prosodic units above the word: the Accentual Phrase (AP), Intermediate Phrase (ip) and Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP is slightly larger than a word and is characterized by a general LH (rising) contour. The L can be attributable to either an L* tone on a lexically-stressed syllable or an L initial boundary tone if the stressed syllable occurs late in the AP. The AP-final syllable always has a phonologically High boundary tone (Ha). The initial AP is realized in a large pitch range, and subsequent APs within the same ip are realized in successively reduced pitch ranges. Tones of larger prosodic units will also be discussed.