Prosodic transposition of polar questions and focus in Whistled Turkish: Trade-offs in communicative efficiency

Abstract

Interlocutors use prosodic cues to package information– highlight or background certain units– to achieve communicative goals such as prompting responses or stating facts. This study investigates how whistlers transpose the prosodic strategies of Spoken Turkish into the reduced acoustic system of Whistled Turkish, in which the narrow band of frequency primarily transposes segmental features. We conducted an experimental study focusing on polar questions and focus constructions, measuring and comparing frequency, intensity and duration values of focused and non-focused constituents. In polar questions, the prosodic cues of Spoken Turkish were transposed into the whistled modality in that a constituent preceding the question particle had higher frequency values compared to its non-focused counterparts. However, this strategy was obscured by frequency modulations caused by vowel-consonant transitions. In focus constructions, only the immediate prever bal position was marked by frequency modulations, which is suggested to be the unmarked focus position in Spoken Turkish. The results indicate that the frequency channel is used in Whistled Turkish to convey both segmental features, which carry the lexical information necessary for intelligibility, and prosodic information. There are modality-specific trade offs, and whistlers exert more effort to transpose the prosodic cues that convey high benefits to achieve communicative efficiency without a breakdown.