Intonation in questionable sentence (closed questions) with the speakers of the Czech minority in Croatia
Abstract
The paper presents research results of voice characteristics of the Czech minority members in Croatia from the area of Daruvar and Končanica, which was conducted in 2015 and 2016. The Czech speakers have been living in Croatia for several generations and all of them are Czech and Croatian bilinguals, which leads to the emergence of a number of interferences between the two languages.
These interferences are partially described on other levels of language and in the context of phonetics elements of segmental level, but prosodic elements have not been described so far. The material was recorded in the families of students of fourth and fifth grade of Czech primary schools in Daruvar and Končanica according to predetermined criteria, which enable an analysis of the different levels of language, and it includes three generations of speakers.
In the captured material, melody of questionable sentences were analyzed, specifically closed questions (questions without question words) in the Czech language, where we discovered features that, according to previous studies of famous Czech phoneticians J. Chlumský, B.
Hála, M. Romport, Fr.
Daneš and Z. Palková, are not typical in Czech language.
The question is whether it is an interference of Croatian language. The survey was created as a parallel with a phonetic research in the Czech Republic, aimed at segmental and suprasegmental phenomena in the Czech speeches in the area of the Czech Republic, but in the Czech minority this is the first study of this kind.
The collected material was analyzed by flow F0 in Praat controlled by the auditory method, most likely in the units of semitones.