Nanette Veilleux, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and Alejna Brugos are collaborating with Byron Ahn at Princeton in the ongoing development of PoLaR, a framework for systematic annotation of suprasegmental annotating prosody and prosodic characteristics. “PoLaR” stands for Points, Levels, and Ranges – three of the core suprasegmental characteristics of intonation that are transcribed in the system.
A chief characteristic of PoLaR is that it aims to decompose prosodic labels into individual prosodic characteristics and cues to prosodic categories, as opposed to transcribing bundles of features (i.e., phones) or cognitive categories (i.e., phonemes). PoLaR facilitates the labelling of individual prosodic characteristics and cues to those characteristics. Characteristics/cues are unbundled from one another on individual tiers, with labels being maximally transparent. To learn more about using PoLaR to label intonation, please visit polarlabels.com.