SAMPROSA (SAM Prosodic Transcription)

Summary. For full text see doc. no. SAM-UCL-037: Wells, J., Barry, W., Grice, M., Fourcin, A., Gibbon, D., 1992, Standard Computer-Compatible Transcription. ESPRIT project 2589 (SAM).

SAMPROSA is designed for application in multi-tier transcription and representation systems; in such transcriptions and representations, independent parallel symbolic representations are made of an utterance (a signal) using different segmental or prosodic criteria. The parallel symbolic representations may be related in two different ways:

Association: Phonological rules are defined which relate prosodic and segmental units (cf. Goldsmith 1990, Autosegmental and metrical phonology).
Synchronisation: The symbols may be assigned to the signal as tags or annotations; the temporal relations between symbols are then given empirically (extensionally) via their position with respect to the signal.

The main practical applications for SAMPROSA are in the two areas of

prosodic transcription for linguistic purposes, and

prosodic labelling in speech technology and experimental phonetic research.

SAMPROSA (SAM PROSodic Alphabet) Symbol Set (DRAFT)

		SAMPROSA	ASCII		Definition
Local tone	H		72		High pitch
		L		76		Low pitch
		T		84		Top pitch (extreme H)
		B		66		Bottom pitch (extreme L)
		M		77		Mid pitch
		+		43		Higher pitch
		++		43,43		Much higher pitch
		+-		43,45		Peak (upward-downward)
		-		45		Lower pitch
		--		45,45		Much lower pitch
		-+		45,43		Trough (downward-upward)
		^		94		Upstep
		^^		94,94		Wide upstep
		!		33		Downstep
		!!		33,33		Wide downstep
		= or > or S	61 62 or 83	Level or same tone

Global tone : 	from Local and Nuclear tone repertoire

Terminal tone: 	from Local and Nuclear tone repertoire

Nuclear tone	-		45		Level tone (before tone group boundary)
		' or / or R	39 47 or 82	Rising tone
		` or \ or F	96 92 or 70	Falling tone
		`' (etc.)	96,39 (etc.)	Fall-rise
		'` (etc.)	39,96 (etc.)	Rise-fall

Length		:		58		Segment length mark

Stress		"		34		Primary stress
		%		37		Secondary stress

Pause		...		46,46,46	Silence

Boundary	$		36		Syllable boundary
		#		35		Word boundary
		|		124		Tone group boundary (non-directional)
		[		91		Tone group boundary (left)
		]		93		Tone group boundary (right)

Metasymbols	-		45		Separator (the underscore,
					_, ASCII 95, may replace this owing
					to ambiguity with level tone)
		*		42		Conjunctor

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Maintained by J.C. Wells. Created 1995 09 19