Introduction

The ToDI system

This course introduces the ToDI system for transcription of intonation in Dutch.

As the name suggests, ToDI was inspired by the well-known ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) system for transcription of intonation for American English (Beckman and Ayers 1994). However, ToDI differs sufficiently from ToBI to warrant a different name. In particular, ToDI focuses on the transcription of tones, and does not deal with various degrees of boundary strength. That is, there are no break indices in ToDI. Instead, ToDI uses a single boundary: between intonation phrases.

ToDI also differs from two earlier systems for transcription of Dutch Intonation:

The IPO grammar of intonation (Collier and 't Hart 1981, 't Hart, Collier and Cohen 1990), which is based on pitch movements. Instead, like ToBI, ToDI is based on pitch targets or tones.
The tone-based analysis of Gussenhoven (1988 and later work). Although similar in many respects, ToDI is less abstract, easier to apply.

This course assumes no familiarity with any of these systems. The primary aim is to introduce the ToDI system to you, and to help you become proficient in intonation transcription using the ToDI system in a relatively short amount of time.

However, this is not a course in phonetics. It is assumed that the reader has a solid background in either phonology or phonetics, and is familiar with the various speech analysis tools used in phonetic research.

Comments are welcome. If these concern matters of substance, please send them to c.gussenhoven@let.kun.nl.

Literature

M.E. Beckman and G.M. Ayers (1994). Guidelines for ToBI transcription. Version 2.0. Ms

R. Collier and J. 't Hart (1981). Cursus Nederlandse Intonatie. Leuven: Acco.

E. Grabe (1998). Comparative Intonational Phonology: English and German. Nijmegen: MPI Series in Psycholinguistics.

C. Gussenhoven (1988). Adequacy in intonation analysis: The case of Dutch. In H. van der Hulst & N. Smith (eds.) Autosegmental Studies on Pitch Accent. Dordrecht: Foris.

C. Gussenhoven (1991). Tone segments in the intonation of Dutch. In Thomas F. Shannon & Johan P. Snapper (eds.) The Berkeley Conference on Dutch Linguistics 1989. Lanham (MD): University Press of America.

C. Gussenhoven & T. Rietveld (1992). A target-interpolation model for the intonation of Dutch. In Proceedings ICSPL 92. 1235-1238.

J. 't Hart, R. Collier and A. Cohen (1990). A perceptual study of intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Proceed with section 0.2