Study title

This file contains instructions for the steps we followed for the curve fitting analysis of intonation in the Greek in Contact project. The instructions below assume that a number of .wav and Praat TextGrid pairs have been created. This process has been applied to the processing of intonation in three types of utterances (declaratives, polar questions, and continuation rises) in six language varieties (Athenian Greek, Cretan Greek, Asia Minor Greek, Corfiot Greek, Cypriot Greek, Venetian Italian, and Turkish). You can read some of the results published at https://greekincontact.phon.ox.ac.uk/research. Note that separate scripts, not included in this document, are necessary to complete some of the steps below, which will be pointed out when they are mentioned. The commands included below have been created to run in a Linux environment but should also work in a Mac terminal. The main data of the project, as well as the scripts necessary to process the data have been deposited to https://doi.org/10.5287/bodleian:keKQbgg7Y.The way we speak is influenced by factors such as age, sex, where we grow up and social interactions over our lifetimes. Most people know that regional dialects may use different words (a 'bread roll' is a 'cob' in the East Midlands) or vary in individual sounds (Londoners will tend to pronounce 'think' as 'fink'), but are generally not aware of differences in intonation, the melody of speech. For example in Southern British English the sentence Jack did it, ending with the voice going down, typically signals a statement, but when the voice goes up it becomes a request for confirmation. But in Belfast English a rising pitch is used for both meanings. Therefore our speech patterns reveal not only what we want to put across, but also a speaker's language or region. Studying those differences has the power to uncover past and present ethnic interactions. In this project we analyse the selected speech melodies from regions where Greeks lived alongside...