ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) is a theory of intonation proposed by Silverman et. al. (1992) where each word can be associated with one of five types of [[pitch accent|pitch accents]]. ToBI proposes a tagging system that describes tags for tones (such as pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones) and breaks (the strength of the pause between words). For instance, in the sentence "Mary went to the store?", emphasis can be placed on "Mary" or "store", resulting in a rising tone. For American English Beckman and Hirschberg (1994) proposed the following labels for the pitch accents: | Labels | Pitch Accents | | ----- | ------------------ | | H* | peak accent | | L* | low accent | | L*+H | scooped accent | | L+H* | rising peak accent | | H+!H* | step down | For the boundary tones: | Labels | Boundary Tones | | ------ | ------------------------------- | | L-L% | final fall (declarative) | | L-H% | continuation rise (sequence) | | H-H% | question rise (yes-no question) | | H-L% | final level plateau | For the [[prosodic boundary]], or breaks: | Label | Boundary | | ----- | -------------- | | 4 | Major boundary | | 3 | Minor boundary | | 2,1,0 | No boundary || | ![[tobi-example-beckman.png]] Source: Beckman & Ayers 1997