A New Intonational Annotation Framework

A newly developed intonational annotation framework (PoLaR) that is better suited for studying variation, the phonetics-phonology interface, and understudied languages/varieties

This collaborative project aims to create a new annotation framework that is geared towards doing (narrower) transcription of the core characteristics of intonation, in a way that maps individual intonational characteristics (such as pitch scaling, pitch alignment, prominence/phrasing, etc.) onto individual labels. This design is intended to facilitate the labelling process and the discovery of (new) systematicities in how acoustic form (characteristics of intonation) and discrete linguistic categories (phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, etc.) are connected.

An example file labelled in both PoLaR and MAE_ToBI
While a goal of the PoLaR project is the creation of a new annotation system, it does not aim to supplant any existing annotation system. Files can (and in some cases, should) be annotated with multiple annotation sytems, in the way that the example to the left is annotated in both PoLaR and MAE_ToBI.

Further details, including annotation guidelines, sample transcriptions, and other software tools can be found on the PoLaR website: polarlabels.com.

some work in this project