Multicultural London English Intonation: Pattern and Performance

Multicultural London English (MLE) intonation awaits detailed description though its distinctiveness on other linguistic levels is well-established. MLE descriptions typically derive from sociolinguistic interviews, ill-suited to elaboration of an intonational description of a new variety. We propose a method for forming generalizations about an intonational system from (semi-)spontaneous interview data, where tokens for prosodic analysis are identified using non-prosodic criteria, to avoid circularity. We explore two features which each demonstrate a different type of selection criteria, applied to corpus data from eight MLE speakers from East London: i) polar questions, identified by ‘next-turn-proof’; and ii) emphatic lengthening, identified from segmental phonetic cues. Identified tokens were auditorily annotated for contour shape (fall, rise, rise-fall, etc.) and segmental landmarks manually labelled. We use landmark registered fPCA to explore the mapping of F0 contours to auditory labels, controlling for stress position in target words. The range of MLE polar question contours resembles that of Mainstream English Varieties but their relative frequency is highly distinct. Emphatic consonant lengthening (ECL) favors word-initial obstruent targets but the near-ubiquitous rise-fall contours on ECL-lengthened words and on polar questions are phonetically very similar. We note relevant features of substrate varieties and suggest features amenable to the same method.