Intonation patterns in Croatian and German: a contrastive analysis

Maligec, Mihael. (2018). Intonation patterns in Croatian and German: a contrastive analysis. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Phonetics
Department of German Language and Literature. [mentor Pletikos Olof, Elenmari and Anđel, Maja].

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Abstract

This thesis represents the contrastive analysis of intonational systems of Croatian and German. As a part of prosody, intonation can be defined as “an entity created by successive tone changes” (Škarić, 1991: 285). It is also called the speech melody. A research was conducted in order to determine whether native speakers of Croatian who study German as L2 are able to use intonation patterns typically used by native speakers of German. For this purpose 22 native speakers of Croatian who are students of German as L2 and 10 native speakers of German were acoustically recorded. The recordings were tested both empirically and acoustically by analysing the fundamental frequency. The results of tone analysis in intonation nuclei show that native speakers of Croatian, who study German as L2, despite being high proficiency German speakers, still do not use intonation patterns typically used by native speakers of German. The results are also not significantly different if the level of studies of non-native German speakers is taken into account. As expected, falling intonation was found in both declarative statements and questions with a question word if Croatian and German were L1. A bigger difference was found in question statements without a question word: in Croatian as L1 most often appeared inverse nuclei (46%), followed by falling (30 and 40%) and rising nuclei (13 and 24%). In German as L1 there were very few falling nuclei (6%), while the majority of them were rising nuclei (94%). In this type of utterances German L2-speakers transferred their habits form L1 which is Croatian. Based on both contrastive analysis and research results this thesis also suggests teaching principles and exercises to be used in teaching German as L2.

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