1INTSINT, an INternational Transcription System for INTonation, was originally developed as a tool for linguists to provide a surface phonological representation of an intonation pattern. The original version of the system (Hirst, 1987) was based on an inventory of minimal pitch contrasts found in published descriptions of the intonation patterns of numerous languages. The aim was to provide a tool for the systematic description of these intonation patterns, along the lines of a narrow transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Like the IPA, it was intended that INTSINT could be used for preliminary descriptions of intonation patterns, even for languages which had not previously been described.
Notice that this aim is very different from that of the ToBI system (Silverman et al., 1992), which pre-supposes that the inventory of intonation patterns for the language being described has already been established. The official website for ToBI makes this particularly explicit:
Note: ToBI is not an International Phonetic Alphabet for prosody. Because intonation and prosodic organization differ from language to language, and often from dialect to dialect within a language, there are many different ToBI systems, each one specific to a language variety and the community of researchers working on that language variety.
(source: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/tobi/)
2The INTSINT system was presented in Hirst & Di Cristo (1998) and was used there for the annotation of the intonation of 9 different languages.
Basically, it describes an intonation contour as a sequence of Tonal segments which are labelled using an alphabet of 8 symbols. The tonal segments are assumed to be of three types:
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Absolute tones t(op) m(id) b(ottom): These are assumed to refer to the corresponding position of the speaker’s current pitch range.
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Relative tones h(igher) s(ame) l(ower): Unlike absolute tones, relative tones are assumed to be defined with respect to the preceding tonal segment. + Iterative relative tones u(pstepped) d(ownstepped): These are also defined relative to the preceding tonal segment but generally involve smaller pitch changes and often occur in a sequence of steps either upwards or downwards.
3In the chapters in Hirst & Di Cristo (1998), the INTSINT tones were represented by graphic symbols represented between two horizontal lines and aligned with the text. These symbols were: Top [⇑]; Bottom [⇓]; Higher [↑]; Same [→]; Lower [↓]; Upstepped [<] and Downstepped [>]. The Mid tone was reserved for the unmarked onset of an Intonation Unit and was not marked. In most later publications the capital letters T, M, B, H, S, L, U, D were used instead of the graphic symbols. In more recent papers, the INTSINT tones are represented with lower case letters rather than upper case. This may help to avoid confusion with other more abstract coding schemes such as ToBI (Silverman et al., 1992), or the even more abstract underlying representation used in (Hirst, 1987) and Hirst 2021 (in press), both of which use some of the same letters as INTSINT.
Although INTSINT was introduced as a descriptive tool for linguists, the fact that its introduction was later than the creation of the f0 modelling tool meant that it was evident from the start that this surface phonological annotation could be linked to the analysis of the f0 curve as a sequence of phonetic anchor points. It was anticipated, then, that it might be possible to map the output of the Momel algorithm onto a sequence of symbols from the INTSINT alphabet.
An algorithm for mapping between Momel anchor points and the INTSINT alphabet was implemented in a plugin for Praat: Momel-INTSINT (Hirst 2007), which makes it possible to derive a transcription with INTSINT automatically from the acoustic signal. The plugin is available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342039069_plugin_momel-intsint