CHAPTER 5, Part B.

           STRESS AND SYNTACTIC SYMBOLS

           Correct speech is more than simply stringing together a series
          of  words or phonemes. The meaning of a sentence is carried by
          the  words, plus rhythm, stress, and intonation (pitch change).
          You  recognize a question by the rising intonation of the voice,
          while  a statement is usually accompanied by falling intonation.
          A  speaker can give certain words in a sentence more importance
          by  adding stress (loudness, pitch and length) to them. Pitch
          often reveals  the emotional state of the speaker. For effective
          communication,  you need to consider these expressive features
          as well as the  segmental features of speech.
           As any good actor knows, punctuation alone is not enough to
          indicate the full meaning of a sentence. Some fine points of
          expression cannot be indicated by using phonemic symbols. Full
          control of the expression of a sentence is gained by directly
          changing the duration and pitch of words and phrases and by
          inserting pauses in the appropriate places.

           DECtalk PC uses stress and syntactic symbols to control aspects
          of  rhythm, stress, and intonation patterns. These symbols
          include  punctuation marks such as commas, periods, and
          exclamation marks.  Punctuation marks are recognized by DECtalk
          PC as indicating special  phrasing requirements. The following
          sections explain  how to improve the phrasing in DECtalk PC
          speech.


                STRESS AND SYNTACTIC SYMBOLS



                          Stress Symbols
                  
                  '               Primary Stress




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                  `               Secondary Stress

                  '               Emphatic Stress
                  /               Pitch Rise

                  \               Pitch Fall
                  /\              Pitch Rise and Fall


                          Syntactic Symbols

                  -               Syllable Boundary
                  *               Morpheme Boundary

                  #               Compound Noun
                  (               Beginning of Prepositional Phrase

                  )               beginning of Verb Phrase
                  ,               Clause Boundary

                  .               End of Sentence
                  ?               End of Question

                  !               End of Exclamation
                  +               New paragraph





                  Primary Stress [']

          Most content words of English (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
          adverbs) contain one primary stressed syllable. DECtalk PC
          represents  primary stress on a syllable with an apostrophe [']
          placed immediately before  the stressed vowel phoneme of the
          word as in the following  example for the word butter.


                  [bahtrr].      (No stress, flat intonation, too rapid.)

                   [baht'rr].             (Stress on the wrong syllable)


                   [b'ahtrr].             (Correct)

          You can also place the primary stress symbol between words, in
          which case it modifies the next word. For example, in the
          sentence  "He rang up the sale," DECtalk PC treats "up" as a



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          preposition  (without stress) instead of a particle. "Up" is
          correctly stressed  if you write the sentence as


                  He rang [']up the sale.

          There can be no space between a stress phoneme and a syntactic
          phoneme (for example, [']) and the following word.
          Secondary Stress [`]

          Use the secondary stress symbol [`] to indicate a degree of
          stress  that is between primary stress and unstressed. Secondary
          stress is  appropriate in the following cases.

          To highlight the next strongest syllable of polysyllabic  words,
          such as "demonstration."

                           [d`ehmaxnstr'eyshaxn].

                   On second parts of compound nouns, as in "answering
          machine.

                   ['aensrrixnx#maxsh`iyn].

                   In some very common words such as "I" and "we."

          DECtalk  realizes secondary stress by lengthening the vowel
          sound  more than unstressed (but less than primary stress). A
          pitch rise  may also occur on an early secondary stress . In
          most cases, you  can leave out the secondary stress symbol.


          Emphatic Stress ["]

          You can place the emphatic stress symbol ["] before any vowel to
          give emphasis to that syllable of the word. Good readers of
          English text understand the message of the sentence well enough
          to  pick out the most important word and emphasize it. DECtalk
          merely  pronounces words; it does not understand the sentences
          it is  saying. DECtalk cannot place emphasis on words to give a
          completely different meaning to the sentence unless you use the
          emphatic stress symbol. Here is an example.


                  Dennis loves Mary.
                   (Usual neutral pronunciation.)

                   [d"ehnihs] loves Mary or "["]Dennis loves Mary.



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                    Dennis -- not Frank -- loves Mary.)

                   Dennis loves [m"ehriy] or Dennis loves"["]Mary.
                    -- not Jill.)


          The exclamation point has a similar effect on the final stress
          of a sentence.


                  Help!


          Unstressed Syllables
           
           The English language contains a set of words that are either
          unstressed or have reduced stress., These are called syntactic
          function words and include the  following  types:


                  Prepositions (for, over)
                   Conjunctions (and, but)
                   Determiners (the, some)
                   Auxiliary verbs (is, has)
                   Pronouns (her, myself)
                   Clause introducers (which, that)


          These words have reduced stress in their dictionary entries. It
          is sometimes necessary to emphasize a function word that is
          stored  in DECtalk PC's dictionary without stress. You can do
          this by  including a primary stress symbol or an emphatic stress
          symbol in  the phonemic transcription as in the following
          example.


                  He went ['owvrr] (or [']over) the fence, not under it.
                   It was the fence that he went ['owvrr] (or [']over).

          
          Pitch Control  [/], [\], [/\]

          DECtalk contains built-in rules to determine the pitch contour
          of  a sentence. While these rules are correct most of the time,
          you  can override them by placing the pitch rise [/], pitch fall
          [\],  and pitch rise and fall [/\] symbols before selected words
          (or  vowels if you want finer control).
           The [/] and [\] symbols must alternate, and the first symbol
          must  be a rise. Note that you can place both a rise and a fall
          on the  same syllable by using [/\]. You can hear the difference
          by trying  the following two sentences.




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                  It's a mad mad mad mad world.


                   It's a [/]mad [\]mad [/]mad [\]mad [/\]world.


          Word Boundary

          Any whitespace character (space, tab, or carriage return) in the
          text indicates a word boundary. DECtalk uses word boundary
          symbols  to select the word- beginning or word-ending allophone
          of a  phoneme.

           Some host computers automatically insert a carriage return into
          lines that are too long (and would go off the edge of the screen
          or paper). This may cause DECtalk PC to pronounce text
          incorrectly if  a carriage return occurs in the middle of a
          word. You can prevent  this problem by breaking long sentences
          with a carriage return at  an appropriate place.
          Syllable Boundary [-]


           DECtalk uses a set of rules to determine where words break into
          syllables, so consonants within words are assigned to their
          correct syllable. Use the syllable boundary symbol [-] to tell
          DECtalk PC where to assign the consonants within ambiguous
          words.  (This type of error rarely happens in DECtalk PC).


                  Example: oration

                   [ow-r'eshaxn] (DECtalk made an incorrect guess.)
                   [owr-'eshaxn] (Correct.)



          Morpheme Boundary [*]

          English words are made up of meaningful units called morphemes.
          For example, "spell" has only one morpheme, while "misspelling"
          is  made up of three: "mis," "spell," and "ing."
           In most cases, the pronunciation of a word does not depend on
          morpheme boundaries. There are exceptions, however, in which
          case  the morpheme boundary symbol [*] can be used to force the
          correct  pronunciation. For example, "misspelling" should be
          pronounced  with a double "s"because each "s" belongs to a
          different morpheme.  Adding the morpheme boundary symbol
          improves  the pronunciation of the word.


                  misspelling.



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                   mixsp'ehlixnx (text to phoneme translation by DECtalk).
                   (The single "s" is too short.)


                   [mixs*sp'ehlixnx]
                   (Better.)



          Compound Noun [#]

           Compound words, such as rush-hour, coffee cup, Thermos bottle,
          answering machine, etc. should be spoken with less  stress on
          the second word. Also, words that were once compounds,  such as
          backache require decomposition for correct  pronunciation.

           DECtalk PC's dictionary includes an extensive list of compound
          words.  You can use the compound noun symbol [#] to correct
          compounds that  are not in the dictionary. For example, for
          "backache," type the  following phonemic transcription.


                  [b'aek#`eyk].



          Using a hyphen in compound words, for example, back-ache, or
          rush-hour  traffic" produces the correct pronunciation most of
          the time. You  rarely need the [*] and [#] phoneme symbols.


          Beginning of Verb Phrase [)]
           Moderately long declarative sentences are usually spoken as if
          they contain two units: a noun phrase and a verb phrase. There
          is  sometimes a slight pause between these two phrases, but
          there is also a slowing down at  the boundary, and the pitch
          tends to fall and then rise. DECtalk  searches for this
          syntactic boundary to change pitch. However, the  rarity or
          ambiguity of some verbs can cause confusion.


                  The old man in the chair was rocking slowly.
                   (Correct verb phrase detected.)

                   The old man in the chair sat rocking slowly.
                   (Verb phrase not detected; pure mechanical analysis of
                   the sentence does not show where "sat" belongs.)


                   The old man in the chair [)s'aet] rocking slowly.
                   (Phonemic correction.)





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          The right parenthesis [)] symbol is useful where a separation is
          needed between phrases but a comma is too strong. For example,
          you  can use [)] to indicate a dangling prepositional phrase.


                  She hit the man with the umbrella.
                   (The man carries the umbrella.)


                   She hit the man [)] with the umbrella.
                   (She uses the umbrella.)

          Past versions of DECtalk also used the [)] symbol for a second
          function to indicate alternate  pronunciations of words that are
          spelled the same but pronounced differently (homographs). (In
          DECtalk V4.0, this has been replaced by a slash "/".) For
          example, the word  "insert" is either a noun or a verb. As a
          noun, it is pronounced  ['ihnsrrt] and as a verb it is
          pronounced [ixns'rrt].   DECtalk will eventually do many of
          these alternate forms automatically.  For example it will
          eventually disambiguate the  following sentences:

                  He refused the produce.
                  He produced the refuse.


          As you can see, this takes a bit more intelligence to choose the
          correct pronunciation automatically.  Currently DECtalk will
          default to the more frequent pronunciation. If  this
          pronunciation is incorrect, simply place a slash at the beginning
          of the word  to obtain  the alternate pronunciation,.

                  The experienced secretary inserts more  /inserts per hour.
          You can also phonemicize the word, e.g.,

                  The experienced secretary inserts more ['ihnsrrts] per hour.

          Note: Placing a slash at the beginning of a homograph to obtain
          the alternate pronunciation will work only if the [:punc some]
          command is enabled.


          Appendix  C  lists the pairs of common homographs that DECtalk
          PC  knows.


          Clause Boundary [,]
           
           When a sentence is composed of more than one clause, it should
          be  spoken in such a way that the listener can easily separate
          the  sentence into its component clauses. The comma [,] is the
          symbol  used to indicate clause boundaries. A comma in text and



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          a comma in  phonemic transcription have identical impact on the
          acoustic realization  of a sentence.

           Inserting a comma improves the quality of spoken sentences in
          the  following cases.


                          After an introductory prepositional phrase:

                           In particular cars cause pollution.
                           (Poor phrasing.)


                           In particular, cars cause pollution.
                           (Correct.)

                           Around a parenthetical remark:


                           A picture it seems is worth . . .
                           (Poor phrasing.)

                           A picture, it seems, is worth . . .
                           (Correct.)


                           In a list of more than two items:

                           They ate apples oranges and bananas.
                           (Poor phrasing.)


                           They ate apples, oranges and bananas.
          (Correct.)


                          After similar types of adjectives:
                          The tall, angular gentleman ...

                          Around phrases and clauses in a particularly
                          long sentence






          Period [.]

           A sentence is usually a single, complete thought. It is also
          the  longest utterance that you can comfortably speak in one
          breath.  DECtalk inserts a pause when it finds a period that
          marks the end  of the sentence, duplicating the human speaker's



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          pause to take a  breath.

           The [.] symbol also tells DECtalk that a complete sentence has
          been sent and it is safe to begin speaking. In letter and word
          mode, DECtalk will speak immediately even if no period or comma
          has been seen.  DECtalk also tests each period to make sure it
          is  not part of a known abbreviation.
          Question Mark [?]


           The simplest way to indicate a question in English is by a
          rising  tone at the end of a sentence, although true question
          intonation  is not that simple and depends on the meaning of the
          question.
          
          There are many cases in English where a question (rising)
          intonation is not appropriate, even though the sentence ends
          with  a question mark. Rhetorical questions or quotations may
          contain a question  mark, but the speaker ends with a period
          (falling tone).  Sentences that begin with "wh" words ("who,"
          "what") usually end with a falling tone, even if they are
          questions.   DECtalk is smart enough to recognize "wh" questions
          and  speak them correctly.


                  Laura ate her broccoli?
                   (DECtalk PC asks a question.)


                   What time is it?
                   (DECtalk PC recognizes a wh-question and does not rise
                   at the end).

























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          Exclamation Point [!]

           Exclamations are short statements spoken with special emphasis.
          DECtalk interprets an exclamation point to mean that the last
          stressed syllable in the sentence should have extra emphasis.


                  Stop!


          Long sentences ending with an exclamation point typically have a
          single word that receives extra stress. DECtalk PC has no way of
          knowing which word to stress and chooses the last word by
          default.  Use the emphatic stress symbol ["] to emphasize a
          different word  when the last word is not appropriate.


                  Joan won the marathon!
                   (DECtalk PC emphasizes the last word.)

                   ["] Joan won the marathon.
                   (Correct.)



          New Paragraph [+]

          The new paragraph phoneme [+] should be inserted in text
          wherever a new thought has begun   (DECtalk does not do this
          automatically because there is no  standard new paragraph
          indicator in general text - the tab is  used in too many other
          ways.)
           
           The new paragraph phoneme [+] modifies the intonation contour
          and  adds variety to running text. The first sentence of a new
          paragraph is produced with a higher, more lively fundamental
          frequency. DECtalk will also pause longer between paragraphs to
          give the listener an indication of a change of topic.

           [+] This paragraph has the [+] phoneme inserted in the
          appropriate  place. The new paragraph symbol can be used in
          other situations,  such as to help indicate the start of a new
          mail message in a list  of mail messages.


          DIRECT CONTROL OF DURATION AND PITCH

           Displaying the correct emotion through voice alone is a
          difficult  task, as any radio actor will tell you. The best
          method is to  experiment with phonemic symbols until you achieve
          the quality you  want. Emotional content is usually connected to



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          the sentence  content, so varying both together is the best way
          to convey  feelings.

           For example, you can have DECtalk say a simple phrase like
          "Good  morning" in several different ways.


                  Good morning.
                   (Normal tone.)

                   Good morning!
                   (Emphatic.)


                   Good morning?
                   (Questioning.)

                   [g"uhd] morning.
                   (Emphasize "good.")



          If these alternatives do not produce what you need, you can use
          direct prosodic control. You must represent the entire sentence
          phonemically,  specifying a duration for each phoneme that does
          not  match the natural model. You should also give some or all
          phonemes  specific target pitch values. DECtalk PC will compute
          smooth  transitions between pitch values, where the specified
          pitch is  reached at the end of the phoneme.


          Duration and Pitch [<>]

          DECtalk PC uses angle brackets [<>] to enclose duration and
          pitch  values of phonemes.
           The format is:


                  <duration,pitch>



          where duration is the length of the phoneme in milliseconds (ms)
          and pitch is the fundamental frequency of the phoneme in hertz
          (Hz).

           Any phoneme may be followed by angle brackets to alter the
          default  duration and pitch. If either value is omitted, or
          specified as 0,  the default value is used. The values for
          duration and pitch are  separated by commas.





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                  [ow]
                   (Normal phonemic specification.)


                   [ow<1000>]
                           (1,000 ms duration.)

                   [ow<,90>]
                   (Default duration, 90 Hz pitch at end.) (note the
                   position of the comma)


                   [ow<1000,90>]
                   (1,000 ms duration, 90 Hz pitch at end.)



          For example, to say "Oh?" with a greater degree of skepticism
          than  DECtalk PC normally imparts, you could type


                  [_<,90>ow<400,150>].



          The [ow] phoneme begins at 90 Hz and ends (after 400 ms) at 150
          Hz.
           
           Note the use of the silence symbol [_] in the example just
          given.  Pitch and duration values must always be attached to a
          preceding  phoneme. The silence symbol is used so that the value
          (90 Hz in  this example) is applied to the beginning tone of the
          next spoken  phoneme [ow].

           Many of the phonemes (all except the stop  consonants p, t, k,
          b, d, and g) can be sustained in a monotone  for an arbitrarily
          long duration by using direct prosodic control.  For example, to
          sustain "ah" for a duration of 10 seconds (10000  ms) at a pitch
          of 120 Hz, type


                  [_<,120>ah<10000,120>].
                   (Produces "ahhhhhhh . . .")



          To produce a prolonged sigh, type


                  [_<100,150>ah<2500,80>].



          where the silence phoneme causes the pitch contour to start at



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          150  Hz at the beginning of the "ah" and end at 80 Hz at the end
          of the  "ah."


          Singing

          Singing uses different voice control techniques than
          conversation.  Even untrained singers add liveliness to the sung
          notes by varying pitch slightly, a quality called vibrato.
          Singing in DECtalk would sound mechanical without vibrato.
           Each word or syllable is defined phonemically. The first number
          following a phoneme is the duration in milliseconds, and the
          second number is the pitch in Hertz. Vowels and consonants not
          assigned a pitch remain at the same pitch as preceding segments.
          You can intersperse silence phonemes if you wish.

           DECtalk stays exactly on pitch when the pitch is specified in
          Hertz (Hz). You can add vibrato (to give a more realistic
          singing  quality) by specifying notes with pitch values from 1
          to 37. Note  1 is C2 and 37 is C5 on an equal tempered scale (A4
          = 440 Hz) as  shown below.  C2 is the second C below middle C on
          a piano,  C4 is middle C, and so on.
          An added feature of DECtalk PC is the ability to specify notes
          by their coded value equivalent (below). The coded value is
          simpler to write and is the exact equivalent of the pitch in
          Hertz.

           When notes are specified, DECtalk PC reaches the desired pitch
          within  about 100 ms after the start of the phoneme and adds
          vibrato after  changing to this pitch. When you give a specific
          non-sung pitch,  DECtalk PC reaches the pitch target at the very
          end of the phoneme  with no vibrato. The following example makes
          DECtalk PC "sing" the  first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth
          Symphony.


                   [d<100,17>aa<400> d<100,17>aa<400>]
                   [d<100,17>aa<400> d<120,13>aa<700>].


          The following table contains the pitch values which can be used
          to allow your DECtalk PC to sing. You may use either the number
          in Hz or the coded value.

          Coded   Note    Pitch (Hz)
          Value

          1       C2      65
          2       C#      69
          3       D       73
          4       D#      77



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          5       E       82      B
          6       F       87      A
          7       F#      92      S
          8       G       98      S       B
          9       G#      103     |       A
          10      A       110     |       R
          11      A#      116     |       I
          12      B       123     |       T
          13      C3      130     |       O       T
          14      C#      138     |       N       E
          15      D       146     |       E       N
          16      D#      155     |       |       O
          17      E       164     |       |       R
          18      F       174     |       |       |      A
          19      F#      185     |       |       |      L
          20      G       196     |       |       |      T
          21      G#      207     |       |       |      O
          22      A       220     |       |       |      |
          23      A#      233     |       |       |      |
          24      B       247     |       |       |      |       S
          25      C4      261     |       |       |      |       O
          26      C#      277     |       |       |      |       P
          27      D       293     |       |       |      |       R
          28      D#      311     |       |       |      |       A
          29      E       329     |       |       |      |       N
          30      F       348             |       |      |       O
          31      F#      370             |       |      |       |
          32      G       392             |       |      |       |
          33      G#      415                     |      |       |
          34      A       440                     |      |       |
          35      A#      466                     |      |       |
          36      B       494                     |      |       |
          37      C5      523                            |       |
          

        Note: C4 is middle C

