System description

A Cat_ToBI transcription for an utterance consists of the following five annotation tiers:

• The Orthographic Tier
• The Phonetic Transcription Tier
• The Break Index Tier
• The Tone Tier
• The Miscellaneous Tier

1. The Orthographic Tier

This tier contains the orthographic transcription of the text.

2. The Phonetic Transcription Tier

This tier contains the phonetic transcription of the text International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

3. The Break Index Tier

The break index tier contains five break indices (BI), 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4.

• BI 0 is used to mark cohesion between orthographic words. Orthographic words separated by BI 0 constitute a prosodic word (PrWord) that may bear only one pitch accent.
• BI 1 is used to indicate boundaries between prosodic words (PrWords). Items separated by BI 1 should carry at most one pitch accent each.
• BI 2 is used to indicate either a perceived disjuncture with no intonation effect, or an apparent intonational boundary but with no slowing or other break cues.
• BI 3 is used to indicate prosodic boundaries between ips (intermediate phrases).
• BI 4 is used to indicate prosodic boundaries between IPs (Intonational Phrases).

4. The Tone Tier

For the intonational analysis of Catalan utterances we recognize two types of tonal events, pitch accents and boundary tones, and two levels of phrasing, the intermediate phrase (ip) and the intonational phrase (IP). The following subsections describe the inventory of those tonal events for Catalan, describing their phonetic realizations and their distributional properties.

4.1. The pitch accents

Nine basic pitch accents have been found in Catalan:

• 2 monotonal: H* and L*
• 5 bitonal: H+L*, L*+H, L+H*, L+¡H* and L+
• 2 additional pitch accents, H*+L and ¡H+L*, have a more restricted dialectal distribution in Catalan

An explanation about the prototypical phonetic realization and distribution of these accents is described in each one of the links.

Please bear in mind that lexically stressed syllables do not necessarily bear a pitch accent and that they can be unaccented (see Vanrell & Prieto 2024 in the References section).

4.2. The boundary tones

Seven types of boundary tones at the end of IPs (marked with the % symbol after the tone) and four types of boundary tones at the end of ips (marked with the - symbol after the tone) have been found in Catalan:

• 3 monotonal: L%, !H% and H%
• 3 bitonal: HL%, LH% and L!H%
• 1 tritonal: LHL%
• 3 monotonal: L-, !H- and H-
• 1 bitonal: LH-

An explanation about the prototypical phonetic realization and distribution of these accents is described in each one of the links.

5. The Miscellaneous Tier

The Miscellaneous Tier has been used for everything from noting non-speech events to commenting on labelling difficulties. Because much of the notation in this tier has not been standardized, it has been of limited use for drawing conclusions from large labelled corpora.

The miscellaneous tier is in essence a ‘comment’ tier for the optional marking of events of any kind other than the standard words, phonetics, tones, and disjunctures marked on the orthographic tier, the phonetic transcription tier, the tone tier, and the break index tier.

Even if our examples in this webpage do not contain this tier, we encourage to use it to note the following events with the corresponding standard labels: