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:

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