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Structural and Referent-Based Effects on Prosodic Expression in Russian
Abstract
This study examines prosody in read productions of two published narratives by 15 Russian speakers. Two distinct sources of variation in acoustic-prosodic expression are considered: structural and referent-based. Structural effects refer to the particular linearization of words in a sentence or phrase. Referent-based effects relate to the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse referent of a word, and to grammatical roles that are partially dependent on referent characteristics. Here, we examine referent animacy and the related grammatical function of subjecthood, and the relative accessibility or information status of a word. We document patterns of prosodic augmentation and prosodic reduction due to structural and referent-based factors, as evident from change in values of acoustic-prosodic measures mean intensity, duration and f0 range. Prosodic augmentation due to structural effects is observed for words positioned ex-situ, independent of their semantic, grammatical or pragmatic features. Prosodic augmentation due to referent-based effects is observed for words that are grammatical subjects with animate referents. Prosodic expression is further affected by referent information status. Discourse-given and discourse-new information show greater prosodic augmentation than inferable information. A closer look at individual speakers' production styles reveals that structural and referent-based variations occur in combination and interact.
... Russian allows pre-verbal (fronted) object placement as well as post-verbal (post-posed) subject placement. The linear sequencing of sentence constituents marks information status or communicative intent and not grammatical function (Bryzgunova, 1980;Luchkina & Cole, 2016;Neelman & Titov, 2009;Sekerina, 2003;Slioussar, 2011b;Švedova, 1982;Yokoyama, 1986). Jasinskaja (2013) argued that in Russian, via the mechanism of word order optimization, the preferred location of discourse-given information is at the left edge of a sentence or phrase, and the preferred location of discourse-new information is sentence-final. ...
... onto goat-ACC jumped fox-NOM The fox jumped onto the goat 6 Language and Speech 00(0) In 1, the object "goat" is pre-verbal and can be construed as a sentence topic, in which case it is likely to be prosodically reduced, or as contrastively focused, in which case its acoustic-prosodic expression is expected to be augmented. Not surprisingly, in previous research on Russian, the information status of discourse entities has been linked to distinctive prosodic characteristics: for example, a falling pitch contour and greater pitch peak height signal discourse-new information (Bryzgunova, 1980;Krylova & Khavronina, 1988;Luchkina & Cole, 2016;Meyer & Mleinek, 2006;Neeleman & Titov, 2009;Yokoyama 1986). ...
... Although the use of acoustic-prosodic expression and constituent linearization have been previously investigated in relation to information status (and focus), the effects of joint application of these mechanisms have only recently been the subject of linguistic research (see, e.g., Calhoun, 2015;Luchkina & Cole, 2016;Patil et al., 2008;Vainio & Järvikivi, 2006). The present study aims to contribute to this growing body of research by examining how constituent linearization (i.e., word order) and acoustic-prosodic expression work separately or together as perceptual cues to prominence in Russian. ...
This study examines the contribution of constituent order, prosody, and information structure to the perception of word-level prominence in Russian, a free word order language. Prominence perception is investigated through the analysis of prominence ratings of nominal words in two published narrative texts. Word-level perceived prominence ratings were obtained from linguistically naïve native speakers of Russian in two tasks: a silent prominence rating task of the read text passages, and an auditory prominence rating task of the same texts as read aloud by a native Russian speaker. Analyses of the prominence ratings reveal a greater likelihood of perceived prominence for words introducing discourse-new referents, as well as words occurring in a non-canonical sentence position, and featuring acoustic-prosodic enhancement. The results show that prosody and word order vary probabilistically in relation to information structure in read-aloud narrative, suggesting a complex interaction of prosody, word order, and information structure underlying the perception of prominence.
... Animate entities inherently attract more attention than inanimate ones (e.g., [26]) suggesting a greater effort in marking them. In Russian, for example, an increase in prosodic prominence on animate referents as compared to inanimate ones has been found [27]. At the same time, animate elements are considered more accessible and thus more easily retrievable in discourse than inanimate entities [28,29], which facilitates an occurrence relatively early in an utterance, often as the subject (see, e.g., [30,31] on German). ...
In this exploratory study, we investigate the influence of several semantic-pragmatic and syntactic factors on prosodic prominence production in German, namely referential and lexical newness/givenness, grammatical role, and position of a referential target word within a sentence. Especially in terms of the probabilistic distribution of accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, deaccentuation) we find evidence for an additive influence of the discourse-related and syntactic cues, with lexical newness and initial sentence position showing the strongest boosting effects on a target word’s prosodic prominence. The relative strength of the initial position is found in nearly all prosodic factors investigated, both discrete (such as the choice of accent type) and gradient (e.g., scaling of the Tonal Center of Gravity and intensity). Nevertheless, the differentiation of prominence relations is information-structurally less important in the beginning of an utterance than near the end: The prominence of the final object relative to the surrounding elements, especially the verbal component, is decisive for the interpretation of the sentence. Thus, it seems that a speaker adjusts locally important prominence relations (object vs. verb in sentence-final position) in addition to a more global, rhythmically determined distribution of prosodic prominences across an utterance.
... A word produced in a phrasal context is perceived as prominent to the extent that it stands out among neighboring words. Many factors are known to contribute to the perceptual prominence of a word, including those related to the speech signal (acoustic prominence), the phonological pitch accent category (accentual prominence), the position of the word in the prosodic phrase (structural prominence), and the semantic properties of the word, such as animacy or thematic role (semantic prominence) Luchkina & Cole, 2017). These factors are all local to the word, or to the prosodic phrase or syntactic clause to which the word belongs. ...
This study investigates the relationship between signal-based factors and discourse context in the production and perception of prominence, extending prior work on prominence in American English by examining speech from complete TED Talks as examples of a public speech style. First, we conduct a production study. The TED Talk speech samples are analyzed for relationships between (1) phonological pitch accent, (2) acoustic prosodic features, and (3) information structure, modeled here in terms of referential and lexical givenness as well as focus related to semantic alternatives. Second, we conduct a perception study. Word-level prominence ratings obtained from untrained listeners are analyzed for the effects of these (1) phonological, (2) acoustic, and (3) information structural factors. The aim of this study is to evaluate the interaction of the three kinds of factors on prominence ratings with speech that is fully contextualized, allowing for information about the speaker, the situational context, and the discourse context to interact with and possibly mediate signal-based cues to prominence. Results from the production analysis show a weak probabilistic relation between pitch accent assignment and information structure for these TED Talk speakers, but only in the presence versus absence of pitch accent with differences between lexical and referential information status. No systematic relationship is found between a word's phonological pitch accent type and information structure category, though we do find some evidence of the expected gradient variation in the acoustic expression of prominence: Words that are more informative tend to have higher pitch and a wider pitch range. Despite the weak association between signal-based prominence and information structure in production, listeners perceive and rate prominence in a manner that is, to varying degrees, in accordance with the Accentual Prominence and Givenness hierarchies. In sum, the findings contribute new evidence of the mediating effects of contextual factors relating to the phonological status of pitch accents, information structure, and speech style on the interpretation of acoustic cues to prominence.
... In the example (8) above two cars is a newly introduced referent while the car has been mentioned before. In Standard Russian, new referents are expected to appear clausefinally and the typical order of referents is "given-before-new", i.e., referents that were already mentioned appear before the ones that were introduced for the first time (e.g., Slioussar, 2011;Luchkina & Cole, 2016). In the example (9) the order of referents is unusual, i.e., a new referent precedes the given one. ...
Heritage speakers (HSs) are known to differ from monolingual speakers in various linguistic domains. The present study focuses on the syntactic properties of monolingual and heritage Russian. Using a corpus of semi-spontaneous spoken and written narratives produced by HSs of Russian residing in the US and Germany, we investigate HSs’ word order patterns and compare them to monolingual speakers of Russian from Saint Petersburg. Our results show that the majority language (ML) of HSs as well as the clause type contribute to observed differences in word order patterns between speaker groups. Specifically, HSs in Germany performed similarly to monolingual speakers of Russian while HSs in the US generally produced more SVO and less OVS orders than the speakers of the latter group. Furthermore, HSs in the US produced more SVO orders than both monolingual speakers and HSs in Germany in embedded clauses, but not in main clauses. The results of the study are discussed with the reference to the differences between main and embedded clauses as well as the differences between the MLs of the HSs.
... The degree of prominence of a word is measured based on the number of listeners and how frequently it was labelled as prominent. The RPT methodology has been used for the study of numerous typologically different languages (for the Germanic languages see Baumann and Winter 2018, Cole et al. 2010; for the Romance languages Hualde et al. 2016 andRoux et al. 2016, and for Russian Luchkina and Cole 2016), enabling meaningful cross-linguistic comparisons. ...
This study investigates the effect of different prosodic variables (e.g., pitch, syllable duration, presence of pitch accent and intonation boundary) and non-prosodic variables (e.g., type of verbal argument, presence of clause boundary, part-of-speech and number of syllables) on the perception of prominence in spontaneous Estonian. Following the methodology of Rapid Prosody Transcription, 396 randomly selected speech fragments from ten speakers were presented over the internet to 51 prosodically untrained listeners, whose task was to highlight the words they heard as prominent. The same dataset was annotated for intonational pitch accents and boundary tones by two experts. The results demonstrate that the strongest predictors of prominence perception are the pitch and duration of stressed syllables together with the presence of a pitch accent while the non-prosodic variables are somewhat weaker. The study corroborates earlier findings in that the perceptual salience in spoken language processing depends largely on the acoustic signal-based cues.
Kokkuvõte. Nele Ots ja Eva Liina Asu: Prominentsuse taju eesti keeles: prosoodia kiirtranskribeerimise uurimus eesti keele kõnelejatega. Artikkel uurib eri prosoodiliste tunnuste (põhitoon, rõhulise silbi kestus, tooni aktsendi ja intonatsioonipiiri olemasolu) ning mitteprosoodiliste tunnuste (verbi argument, klausipiiri olemasolu, sõnaliik ja silpide arv) mõju prominentsuse tajule spontaanses eesti keeles. Lähtudes prosoodia kiirtranskriptsiooni (Rapid Prosody Transcription, RPT) metodoloogiast, esitati 396 juhuslikult valitud spontaanse kõne lõiku interneti teel 51-le prosoodia valdkonnas koolitamata kuulajale, kelle ülesandeks oli tekstis esile tõsta sõnad, mis kuuldusid neile rõhulisena. Kaks kõneprosoodia uurijat transkribeerisid samades kõne lõikudes tooniaktsendid ja intonatsioonipiirid. Tulemused näitavad, et prominentsuse taju tähtsaimad ennustajad on tooniaktsent, põhitoon ning silbi kestus. Mitteprosoodilised tunnused mõjutavad prominentsuse taju mõnevõrra vähem. Katse tulemused kinnitavad varasemate uurimuste järeldust, et tajutud prominentsus sõltub eelkõige akustilistest signaalipõhistest tunnustest.
Märksõnad: prominentsus, taju, intonatsioon, tooniaktsent, sõnaliik, argumendistruktuur, prosoodia kiirtranskriptsioon (RPT), eesti keel
This paper deals with the study of communicative structure used in English and Russian utterances. The study is aimed at analyzing Russian EFL learners’ ability to convey communicative meaning of English
utterances using a variety of L1 (Russian) lexical and syntactic means when translating experimental materials
from L2 (English) to their native tongue. The application of theoretical and empirical methods allowed registering
and classifying translation variants and identifying problems caused by inability of the Russian subjects to understand the communicative meaning of the source sentences with a different location of the communicative center.
The results prove that conveying the emotional coloring of a sentence is a challenging task for the Russian EFL
learners. Comparative analysis of the data with the results from previous studies helps reveal the connection between the ability of the Russian speakers to identify the location of the communicative center and their ability to
choose a correct translation strategy. The paper also addresses the issue of determining nucleus position; its role
in conveying the communicative structure in written speech is crucial. A potential area for application of the results of the study concerns the EFL teaching methods, as they contribute to the development of foreign language
communicative competence of non-linguistic students as well as their translation competence. Outlined are the
perspectives for further research aimed at deeper understanding of the mechanisms determining nucleus position in non-native written speech and significance of prosodic means for conveying communicative meanings in
the process of written and oral translation.
This study tests the influence of acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors on listeners' perception of prominence in three languages whose prominence systems differ in the phonological patterning of prominence and in the association of prominence with information structure-English, French and Spanish. Native speakers of each language performed an auditory rating task to mark prominent words in samples of conversational speech under two instructions: with prominence defined in terms of acoustic or meaning-related criteria. Logistic regression models tested the role of task instruction, acoustic cues and non-acoustic contextual factors in predicting binary prominence ratings of individual listeners. In all three languages we find similar effects of prosodic phrase structure and acoustic cues (F0, intensity, phone-rate) on prominence ratings, and differences in the effect of word frequency and instruction. In English, where phrasal prominence is used to convey meaning related to information structure, acoustic and meaning criteria converge on very similar prominence ratings. In French and Spanish, where prominence plays a lesser role in signaling information structure, phrasal prominence is perceived more narrowly on structural and acoustic grounds. Prominence ratings from untrained listeners correspond with ToBI pitch accent labels for each language. Distinctions in ToBI pitch accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, unaccented) are reflected in empirical and model-predicted prominence ratings. In addition, words with a ToBI pitch accent type that is typically associated with contrastive focus are more likely to be rated as prominent in Spanish and English, but no such effect is found for French. These findings are discussed in relation to probabilistic models of prominence production and perception.
Much of what is known about prosody is based on native-speaker intuitions of idealized speech, or on prosodic annotations from expert annotators trained to interpret a visual display of f0. These approaches have been deployed to study prosody primarily in languages accessible to university researchers, and largely based on small, homogenous speech samples from college-aged adult speakers. We describe an alternative approach, with coarse-grained annotations collected from a cohort of untrained annotators performing real-time Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) using LMEDS, an open-source software tool we developed to enable large-scale, crowd-sourced prosodic annotation over the internet. We compared nearly 100 lab-based and crowd-sourced RPT annotations for a 300-word, multi-talker sample of conversational American English, with annotators from the same (US) vs. different (Indian) dialect groups. Results show greater inter-annotator agreement for same-dialect annotators, and the best overall reliability from crowd-sourced US annotators. Statistical models show that a common set of acoustic and contextual factors predict prominence and boundary labels for all annotator groups. Overall, crowd-sourced prosodic annotation is shown to be efficient, and to rely on established cues to prosody, supporting its use for prosody research across languages, dialects, speaker populations, and speech genres.
Much of what is known about prosody is based on native speaker intuitions of idealized speech, or on prosodic annotations from trained annotators whose auditory impressions are augmented by visual evidence from speech waveforms, spectrograms and pitch tracks. Expanding the prosodic data currently available to cover more languages, and to cover a broader range of unscripted speech styles, is prohibitive due to the time, money and human expertise needed for prosodic annotation. We describe an alternative approach to prosodic data collection, with coarse-grained annotations from a cohort of untrained annotators performing rapid prosody transcription (RPT) using LMEDS, an open-source software tool we developed to enable large-scale, crowd-sourced data collection with RPT. Results from three RPT experiments are reported. The reliability of RPT is analysed comparing kappa statistics for lab-based and crowd-sourced annotations for American English, comparing annotators from the same (US) versus different (Indian) dialect groups, and comparing each RPT annotator with a ToBI annotation. Results show better reliability for same-dialect annotators (US), and the best overall reliability from crowd-sourced US annotators, though lab-based annotations are the most similar to ToBI annotations. A generalized additive mixed model is used to test differences among annotator groups in the factors that predict prosodic annotation. Results show that a common set of acoustic and contextual factors predict prosodic labels for all annotator groups, with only small differences among the RPT groups, but with larger effects on prosodic marking for ToBI annotators. The findings suggest methods for optimizing the efficiency of RPT annotations. Overall, crowd-sourced prosodic annotation is shown to be efficient, and to rely on established cues to prosody, supporting its use for prosody research across languages, dialects, speaker populations, and speech genres.
This book offers a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Different chapters examine the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors’ introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part II covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part III is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world’s language families.
In chapter 12 'Information Structure and Unmarked Word order in (Older) Germanic', Roland Hinterhözl proposes a novel interface-based account to the distinction between OV-and VO-languages in Germanic. Dispensing with the head complement parameter, he argues that the unmarked word order in these languages is determined by two types of mapping conditions at the interfaces to PF and LF. The chapter investigates mixed OV/VO orders in the OHG Tatian translation and shows that OHG cannot be treated as a language with basic OV-order plus a higher degree of extraposition. Instead, it is shown that word order is predominantly determined by information-structural restrictions in OHG. The account is embedded in a phase-based model of the interaction between syntactic, prosodic and information-structural conditions that define the characteristic word order properties of OV-and VO-languages in Germanic.
Variations in postverbal constituent ordering have been attributed to both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness), although few studies compare the two factors explicitly. Through corpus analysis and experimentation, we demonstrate that both factors simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. While past investigations of these factors have focused on their effects in language comprehension, we argue that postponing heavy and new constituents facilitates processes of planning and production.
This thesis is primarily concerned with language production. In particular it investigates
two issues: First, it explores some of the processing mechanisms underlying the
production of different syntactic structures and word orders. Second, it explores the
production of different syntactic structures and word order from a developmental perspective.
These two issues are investigated experimentally and from a cross-linguistic
point of view.
First, a description is given of the possible word order permutations that Catalan allows
and under which circumstances these word orders are produced. This is extended with
a corpus analysis of spoken Catalan. The aim of this study is twofold: on the one hand,
it aims to present the different positions where subjects and complements of the verb
can appear in a sentence. On the other, it aims to compare the use of passivization
between spoken and newspaper text in Catalan.
Second, my experimental work in language production in four languages is presented.
These languages include English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish. The main
aim of this study is to explore the effects of the non-linguistic factors of animacy and frequency
upon the production of different word orders. The results of four experiments
in the four languages mentioned yield evidence that these non-linguistic factors affect
the on-line processing of language production. In the four languages, participants tend
to prefer to produce syntactic structures which allow animate entities to be realised as
the sentential subject, even if this means producing a passive structure rather than a
(usually preferred) active structure. I have also found evidence that in some languages
(e.g. Catalan and Spanish) animate/frequent entities appear at initial sentence position
in the grammatical category of object (in dislocated active constructions). These results
are explained on the light of some of the models of language production (e.g. Bock
1987a; Bock and Levelt 1994).
Third, further cross-linguistic experiments in three languages (English, Catalan and
Spanish) are presented. There I show that one particular contextual factor, discourse
salience, can also affect the realisation of different syntactic structures during production.
Entities which have been made more salient by the preceding context are more
likely to appear as sentential subjects or in early sentential positions than entities which
have also been introduced in previous discourse but are less salient. I suggest that these
effects can be explained using the same mechanisms that explain other non-linguistic
factors (e.g. animacy). The results also suggest that in the absence of context, animacy
is a strong determinant of syntactic structure and word order, whereas in context, discourse
salience may largely override animacy effects. Finally, these results suggest that
from a processing point of view, the Given/New partition is not enough to account for
the information structure of a sentence, but a more fine-grained distinction is need, in
keeping with some recent pragmatic theories (e.g. Prince 1981, 1992; Sgall et al. 1986).
Finally, I investigate the production of different word orders from a developmental
point of view. In particular I examine the relationship between age and the production
of different word orders by Catalan children, ranging from 4;11 to 11;11 years. The
results of an experiment run with these children show that a dislocated active is a construction
already consolidated at age 5. In contrast, the passive clause is a construction still not fully acquired at age 11. These results seem to suggest that for Catalan children,
a dislocated active is a syntactic structure that is available earlier than the passive
structure. Conversely, the placement of a patient in subject position and the creation
of a verbal passive voice occurs later than simple word order permutation. Finally, a
comparison between these results and existing results from English children shows that
there are cross-linguistic differences on the age of production of passive clauses: while
English children already produce passives at age 5, Catalan children start producing
passives at age 11. I suggest some possible explanations for the cross-linguistic differences
in the production of different syntactic structures.
Overall, the main aim for this study is to gain insight into the production of different
syntactic structures and word orders from a psycholinguistic and developmental point
of view.
Two studies investigated whether speaking mode influences the way German speakers mark the information status of discourse referents in nuclear position. In Study 1, speakers produced narrations spontaneously on the basis of picture stories in which the information status of referents (new, accessible and given) was systematically varied. In Study 2, speakers saw the same pictures, but this time accompanied by text to be read out. Clear differences were found depending on speaking mode: In spontaneous speech, speakers always accented new referents. They did not use different pitch accent types to differentiate between new and accessible referents, nor did they always deaccent given referents. In addition, speakers often made use of low pitch accents in combination with high boundary tones to indicate continuity. In contrast to this, read speech was characterized by low boundary tones, consistent deaccentuation of given referents and the use of H+L* and H+!H* accents, for both new and accessible referents. The results are discussed in terms of the function of intonational features in communication. It is argued that reading intonation is not comparable to intonation in spontaneous speech, and that this has important consequences also for our choice of methodology in child language acquisition research.
This paper analyzes word order alternations, stress shifts and intonational contours related to Information Structure (IS). The data come primarily from Russian, a language that is very rich in this respect. I argue that IS-related grammatical phenomena encode relative accessibility (whether A is more or less accessible than B), rather than some categorical accessibility distinctions (e.g. whether A and B are given or new) and contrast (broadly conceived). Topic and focus are not encoded in the grammar, although they closely correlate with certain grammatical phenomena. I show how the proposed approach allows solving some notorious problems in the IS field. Relative accessibility cannot be encoded by means of dedicated IS features like Top or F(oc), which forces the choice of configurational approaches. Most of them view prosodic means of encoding as primary and derive syntactic phenomena from them (movement into or out of the main stress position). I present several arguments for the primacy of syntactic means and develop an IS model relying on syntactic configurations. They are derived using edge features proposed in Phase Theory after certain modifications are introduced in this framework.
In this paper, we investigate the phonological and phonetic markers of focus and topic intonation in Greek. We have found that both focus and topic are marked by phrasing, type of pitch accent and boundary tone. One difference between the two is that, on the one hand, focus deletes a boundary after the focus word and de-accents all following words. On the other hand, topicalization creates an IP boundary at the end of the topic phrase. The second difference is that, in declarative sentences, topic has a L* Nuclear Pitch Accent (NPA) followed by a H%, whereas focus has a H* NPA followed by a L%; in interrogatives, the topic NPA is H* followed by L% and the focus NPA is L* followed by the HL% of Greek polar questions. In addition, we found that focus is phonetically marked by lengthening of the whole sentence.
In this article we discuss some empirical results concerning the impact of different levels of information status (i.e. referents and words, respectively) on the prosodic realisation of referential expressions in annotated corpora of read and spontaneous speech. Both at the referential and at the lexical level not only given and new but also intermediate classes of givenness/novelty have to be distinguished. We provide a brief introduction to our two-dimensional RefLex annotation scheme and discuss its application to a number of examples from the theoretical literature which cannot be described satisfactorily by means of previous annotation schemes. From these examples we derive hypotheses on the relationship between information status and accent position as well as accent type. The hypotheses are generally confirmed for read speech showing a stepwise increase in prosodic prominence from given to new items, predominantly ordered according to the information status at the lexical level. The results of the relationship between prosody and information status are found to be less clear in spontaneous speech, probably due to the production of shorter intonation phrases reducing the variability of accentuation in marking different levels of givenness.
This is an experimental study of syntactic and tonal correlates of focus in Greek and Russian. Three experiments were carried out the results of which indicate: First, the dominant word order is SVO in both Greek and Russian. Second, focus distinctions have inverse word order effects, according to which syntactic elements of focus elicitations are dislocated at sentence beginning and sentence end for Greek and Russian respectively. Third, focus has a local tonal range expansion and a global tonal range compression in both Greek and Russian.
Variations in postverbal constituent ordering have been attributed to both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness), although few studies compare the two factors explicitly. Through corpus analysis and experimentation, we demonstrate that both factors simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. While past investigations of these factors have focused on their effects in language comprehension, we argue that postponing heavy and new constituents facilitates processes of planning and production.
This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subject–verb–object sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0, and (2) focus breadth, such that narrow object focus is marked with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0 on the object than wide focus. Furthermore, when participants are made aware of prosodic ambiguity present across different information structures, they reliably mark focus type, so that contrastively focused elements are produced with greater intensity, longer duration, and lower mean and maximum F0 than noncontrastively focused elements. In addition to having important theoretical consequences for accounts of semantics and prosody, these experiments demonstrate that linear residualisation successfully removes individual differences in people's productions thereby revealing cross-speaker generalisations. Furthermore, discriminant modelling allows us to objectively determine the acoustic features that underlie meaning differences.
A production study is presented that investigates the effects of word order and information structural context on the prosodic realization of declarative sentences in Hindi. Previous work on Hindi intonation has shown that: (i) non-final content words bear rising pitch accents (Moore 1965, Dyrud 2001, Nair 1999); (ii) focused constituents show greater pitch excursion and longer duration and that post-focal material undergoes pitch range reduction (Moore 1965, Harnsberger 1994, Harnsberger and Judge 1996); and (iii) focused constituents may be followed by a phrase break (Moore 1965). By means of a controlled experiment, we investigated the effect of focus in relation to word order variation using 1200 utterances produced by 20 speakers. Fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of constituents were measured in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) sentences in different information structural conditions (wide focus, subject focus and object focus). The analyses indicate that (i) regardless of word order and focus, the constituents are in a strict downstep relationship; (ii) focus is mainly characterized by post-focal pitch range reduction rather than pitch raising of the element in focus; (iii) given expressions that occur pre-focally appear to undergo no reduction; (iv) pitch excursion and duration of the constituents is higher in OSV compared to SOV sentences. A phonological analysis suggests that focus affects pitch scaling and that word order influences prosodic phrasing of the constituents.
The main objective of the paper is to show that for an adequate analysis of an item’s information status in spoken language two levels of givenness have to be investigated: a referential and a lexical level. This separation is a crucial step towards our goal to arrive at the best possible classification of nominal expressions occurring in natural discourse which reflects our understanding of all important aspects related to an item’s givenness or novelty (“information status”). For that purpose, we first introduce our motivation for this division which stems from the observation that both levels of information status have an influence on an item’s prosodic marking. Section 2 presents basic concepts including the cognitive dimensions which have been discussed in the literature on givenness, in particular the role of knowledge, consciousness and (un)importance. In Section 3, we give an overview of influential proposals to classify and order the various concepts. In doing so, we explain and relate the most important concepts that play a role in classifying nominal expressions: coreference, bridging, inference, hearer knowledge, indexicality, embeddedness. A number of paradoxes and inconsistencies of the presented approaches are discussed, which can be resolved by the insight that there are two different notions of givenness which apply to expressions of different syntactic-semantic type. We refer to them as referential givenness (r-givenness) and lexical givenness (l-givenness), and provide the semantic basis for these two concepts. In Section 4, we propose a fine-grained two-level annotation scheme for the analysis of an item’s information status, called the RefLex scheme. Section 5 takes a closer look at the prosody of the proposed labels in combination and develops a couple of hypotheses which are tested in two small exemplary corpora of spontaneous and read German speech.
This article presents the results of a recall experiment on Modern Greek experiential verbs. The influence of the factors subjecthood, thematic role (agent, experiencer), and animacy on word order and their interaction is investigated with three different types of experiencer verbs, namely experiencer subject (ES) verbs, labile [±agentive] experiencer object verbs, and non-agentive experiencer object (EO) verbs. The experimental results show that while a tendency to preserve the preferred SVO order is visible with all examined verb classes, this effect is weakened by an experiencer-first preference for EO verbs. Furthermore, for EO verbs the crucial factor for the argument order preferences is the property [±agentive] of the stimulus while animacy does not exhibit an independent effect in our findings. These results support the separation of the three types of experiential verbs, which is suggested in psych-verb theories on the basis of their different syntactic behavior.
In this article we (re) consider how animacy, a conceptual property of referents, affects word order. It is commonly assumed that animacy effects arise during conceptualization, taken broadly to include processing at a mental model level. The order in which referents are conceptualized can directly affect word order. That is, animates tend to surface in the initial position in sentences, regardless whether or not it is a subject position. There is, however, some indication that animacy and thematic role interact under certain task conditions (e.g. Ferreira 1994). We suggest that such interactions occur when speakers change the time course of referent processing to reduce the processing workload during the upcoming utterance. When they compact preutterance planning sufficiently, for example, by overlapping processing of referents, they can cram in more processing with minimal lengthening of planning time. But this overlap facilitates an interaction of referent information that does not occur with more sequential planning. We present data from three German picture description experiments that, taken together, support this account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Intentions in Communication brings together major theorists from artificial intelligence and computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology whose work develops the foundations for an account of the role of intentions in a comprehensive theory of communication. It demonstrates, for the first time, the emerging cooperation among disciplines concerned with the fundamental role of intention in communication. The fourteen contributions in this book address central questions about the nature of intention as it is understood in theories of communication, the crucial role of intention recognition in understanding utterances, the use of principles of rational interaction in interpreting speech acts, the contribution of intonation contours to intention recognition, and the need for more general models of intention that support a view of dialogue as a collaborative activity.
Contributors
Michael E. Bratman, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque, Martha E. Pollack, Henry Kautz, Andrew J. I. Jones, C. Raymond Perrault, Daniel Vanderveken, Janet Pierrehumbert, Julia Hirschberg, Richmond H. Thomason, Diane J Litman, James F. Allen, John R. Searle, Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner, Herbert H. Clark and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs. The book also includes commentaries by James F. Allen, W. A Woods, Jerry Morgan, Jerrold M. Sadock Jerry R. Hobbs, and Kent Bach.
Intentions in Communication is included in the System Development Foundation Benchmark Series.
Bradford Books imprint
The perception of prosodic prominence in spontaneous speech is investigated through an online task of prosody transcription using untrained listeners. Promi-nence is indexed through a probabilistic prominence score assigned to each word based on the proportion of transcribers who perceived the word as prominent. Correlation and regression analyses between perceived prominence, acoustic measures and measures of a word's information status are conducted to test three hypotheses: (i) prominence perception is signal-driven, influenced by acoustic fac-tors reflecting speakers' productions; (ii) perception is expectation-driven, influ-enced by the listener's prior experience of word frequency and repetition; (iii) any observed influence of word frequency on perceived prominence is mediated through the acoustic signal. Results show correlates of perceived prominence in acoustic measures, in word log-frequency and in the repetition index of a word, consistent with both signal-driven and expectation-driven hypotheses of prominence percep-tion. But the acoustic correlates of perceived prominence differ somewhat from the correlates of word frequency, suggesting an independent effect of frequency on prominence perception. A speech processing account is offered as a model of s ignal-driven and expectation-driven effects on prominence perception, where prominence ratings are a function of the ease of lexical processing, as measured through the activation levels of lexical and sub-lexical units.
This paper examines how ordinary listeners, naïve with respect to the phonetics and phonology of prosody, perceive the location of prosodic boundaries that demarcate speech "chunks" and prominences that serve a "highlighting" function, in spontaneous speech (Buckeye corpus). Over 70 naïve listeners marked the locations of prominences and boundaries in a real-time transcription task. Fleiss' multi-transcribers' reliability tests show that naïve transcribers are consistent in their perception of prosodic boundaries and prominences. Specifically, we observe higher multi-transcriber agreement scores for boundary marking than for prominence marking. Variation between transcriptions of the same speech excerpt produced by different listeners reveals individual differences in the perception of prominences and boundaries. Variation in Fleiss' multi-transcribers' agreement scores for excerpts from different speakers suggests that speakers vary in how they structure an utterance prosodically and/or in how effectively they cue prosodic structure. We also find that nuclear prominences are more consistently perceived by naïve listeners than prenuclear prominences. The finding that naïve listeners agree well above chance on the location of prosodic events indicates that naïve transcription is a valid method for prosody analysis which can augment analysis based solely on expert labeling.
This production study examines the prosodic means of encoding contrast in Hindi. Different target words were embedded in carrier sentences and were put in two information structural contexts, wide and contrastive focus. Contrary to what is expected from earlier findings Hindi uses prosodic means of expressing contrast on the focused word, namely an increase in pitch span and duration. These results may contribute to the understanding of intonational phonology and to the prosodic classification of Hindi.
Prosodic structure has been assumed to serve as a frame for articulation, so that phonetic shaping of abstract phonological representations is fine-tuned as a function of the prosodic system of the language. The intricate relationship between phonetics and prosodic structure has been explored in the literature under the rubric of the phonetics–prosody interface. This paper reviews various aspects of the phonetics–prosody interface and discusses how prosodic structure modulates phonetic realization within and across languages. A particular attention is paid to boundary-related prosodic strengthening (i.e., spatial and/or temporal expansion of articulation that arises in the vicinity of prosodic junctures), especially in association with domain-initial positions (also known as domain-initial strengthening, DIS, effects). Prosodic boundary strengthening is further discussed in terms of how it is language-specifically fine-tuned, how it is understood in dynamical terms, and how it relates to linguistic functions (as syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic contrast enhancement) that are all further conditioned by other factors of the linguistic sound system of individual languages such as the prominence system and the phonetic feature system.
Chapter 11 'Information Structure and OV order' by {Thorn}orbjörg Hróarsdóttir studies the change from object-verb order to verb-object order. A number of European languages have undergone such a change and here the focus is on the change in Icelandic. Morphological triggers, or the absence thereof, have often been related to clustering of syntactic properties in both diachronic change and acquisition. As seen from the English viewpoint inflectional morphology may express the relevant cue for parameters, and hence the loss of inflection may lead to a grammar change. This paper argues that this analysis does not carry over to Icelandic, as the loss of OV in Icelandic took place despite rich case morphology. Instead, it is argued that the relevant cue may be expressed differently among languages: While it may have been expressed through morphology in English, it was expressed through information structure in Icelandic. In both cases, external effects led to fewer expressions of the relevant (universal) cue and a grammar change took place. It is also shown how Object Shift in Modern Icelandic supports the claim that the placement of the object in Older Icelandic is connected to information structure.
This paper presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally-occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function, and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed constituents. The data moreover indicate that evoked elements and inferrable elements are treated alike with respect to inversion; both are treated as discourse-old information. Finally, it is suggested that discourse-familiarity correlates not with subjecthood, but rather with relative sentence position.
This second edition presents a completely revised overview of research on intonational phonology since the 1970s, including new material on research developments since the mid 1990s. It contains a new section discussing the research on the alignment of pitch features that has developed since the first edition was published, a substantially rewritten section on ToBI transcription that takes account of the application of ToBI principles to other languages, and new sections on the phonetic research on accent and focus. The substantive chapters on the analysis and transcription of pitch contours, pitch range, sentence stress and prosodic structure have been reorganised and updated. In addition, there is an associated website with sound files of the example sentences discussed in the book. This well-known study will continue to appeal to researchers and graduate students who work on any aspect of intonation.
This paper presents the first study of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Samoan, an Austronesian VSO language. It is shown that while Samoan appears to use syntax to mark focus, focus marking in Samoan actually fits well within the generalisation that focus must be maximally prosodically prominent. Seven native speakers were recorded answering questions about pictures depicting simple events. The questions were designed to elicit agent or object focus, and question-under-discussion (QUD) focus or contrastive focus. Results showed different speakers had different focus-marking strategies. Two consistently used a cleft construction to front the focused constituent. Two speakers fronted focused agents, but not objects. The final three used basic verb-agent-object ordering in all focus conditions. Prosody was analysed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework. The initial phonological phrase was always the most prominent. Therefore, when the focus was fronted, it was maximally prominent, making Samoan a language with prosodically motivated syntactic movement, like Spanish and Hungarian. In the verb-agent-object sentences, the verb and agent were in the initial phrase. Speakers raised the accent on the object in object focus, and lowered it in agent focus; although they did not do this consistently. There was no prosodic marking of focus on the agent. This is interestingly opposite the asymmetry between focus marking on the subject and object in English and Romance languages, with the same prosodic motivation.
This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for and are also examined.
The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions of focus and givenness.
The article reports the results of a cross-linguistic production study the main goal of which was to identify the impact of animacy and thematic asymmetries on linear order and subject choice. The experimental study was carried out on a sample of heterogeneous languages, namely German, Greek, Turkish, and Chinese, which allows us to draw generalizations about several typological variables. In order to investigate the impact of different configurations of animacy and thematic role properties, argument realization was tested with three classes of experiencer verbs: (a) experiencer-subject verbs, (b) ±agentive experiencer-object verbs, and (c) non-agentive experiencer-object verbs. The experimental findings show that animate-first effects occur across languages, an expected result under the view that these effects come from asymmetries in the mental representation of the referents which are independent from particular grammatical properties. Experiencer-first effects depend on the (non-)agentivity of particular verb classes in the lexicon, and as such are language-specific. Indeed it turns out that the experiencer-first effects we observe in languages such as Greek and German are not replicated for Turkish and Chinese. These results mirror the (non-)canonicity of experiencer-objects in the languages investigated.
Traditionally, it has been assumed that emphasis is used to signal that information in a conversation is new, focused, or important. In this chapter, evidence from three sets of experiments suggests that emphasis is the product of a number of different factors that can affect the acoustic prominence of a word in different ways. I present evidence that (1) emphasis can vary continuously, not categorically; (2) differing factors like difficulty of production and informational importance have different effects on how emphasis is acoustically realized; and (3) listeners do not treat all acoustic correlates of emphasis equally when processing speech, suggesting that they are sensitive to the fact that emphasis is the product of multiple sources. These findings suggest that rather than being a unitary linguistic or psychological construct, emphasis is the product of an array of different cognitive and linguistic factors.
This paper investigates the role of the information structure in the interpretation of nominal elements in Russian. More specifically, it concentrates on the correlations between the position an NP occupies within a sentence and its reading with respect to (in)definiteness. To this end, different ways of indicating (in)definiteness in this language are discussed. Russian, as a language lacking articles, has an option of denoting this feature overtly (lexically or morphosyntactically); alternatively, an NP may remain unspecified. It is proposed that, in the latter case, the interpretation depends on the role the NP has in the discourse (or information) structure. The paper further examines the information packaging of Russian clauses. It is concluded that the appropriate representation of a sentence in this language consists of three parts: optional Topic (s) and Neutral Information and obligatory New Information Focus in a neutral intonation sentence of Contrastive Focus (1992) and King (1995), is contrasted the traditional two-way division into Topic and Focus or Theme and Rheme. Finally, the paper looks at the possible types of NPs representing various functions of information structure. It is shown that neither definiteness nor the related feature of specificity may provide a one-to-one correspondence. It is then demonstrated that the feature underlying the dependence between the interpretation of NP and its role in the information structure is D(iscourse)-linking (Pesetsky 1787).
In this squib, we explore the distribution of focused constituents in Russian. We show that the data support a positive and a negative conclusion. The positive conclusion is that contrastive focus is a composite of the features [contrast] and [focus].1 We are not the first to draw this conclusion; related ideas can be found in Vallduví and Vilkuna 1998, Molnár 2002, McCoy 2003, and Giusti 2006. However, the data on which our claim is based have, to the best of our knowledge, not been described before. The negative conclusion is that the position of focused constituents in Russian cannot be accounted for in terms of conditions on stress assignment, even though Russian displays focus-related word order alternations. This goes against a trend in current research on the relation between stress and focus (see Reinhart 1995, Zubizarreta 1998, and much subsequent work).
Both of our conclusions are based on the fact that different types of focused constituents in Russian share an underlying clause-final position. This is expressed by the generalization in (1), where [focus] is intended to be a feature that contrastive and new information foci have in common. (It is irrelevant to our argumentation whether foci are base-generated clause-finally or end up there via a derivation involving movement.)
The generalization in (1) does not hold on the surface. New information foci (given in capitals) must indeed show up clause-finally, as we illustrate in (2). (Orders in which a new information focus shows up further to the left are ungrammatical; full-sentence replies are of course somewhat bookish, but the judgments are clear.) Contrastive foci, however, are typically fronted, as we will demonstrate below (see Krylova and Khavronina 1988, King 1995, Brun 2001).
(2)
a.
i. Kto dal Kate knigu?
who gave Kate.DAT book.ACC
'Who gave a book to Kate?'
ii. Kate knigu dala ANJA.
Kate.DAT book.ACC gave Anna
'Anna gave a book to Kate.'
b.
i. Komu Anja dala knigu?
who.DAT Anna gave book.ACC
'Who did Anna give a book to?'
ii. Anja dala knigu KATE.
Anna gave book.ACC Kate.DAT
'Anna gave a book to Kate.'
c.
i. Čto Anja dala Kate?
what.ACC Anna gave Kate.DAT
'What did Anna give to Kate?'
ii. Anja dala Kate KNIGU.
Anna gave Kate.DAT book.ACC
'Anna gave a book to Kate.'
What our claim amounts to, then, is that the launching site for the movement of contrastive foci is the position in which new information foci must surface. This follows if contrastive foci are a composite of the features [focus] and [contrast], while new information foci are characterized by [focus] only. Movement of contrastive foci to the left periphery would then be licensed by the feature [contrast], but the launching site of that movement would be dictated by (1).2
(3)
a. [CP . . . [focus]]
b. [CP [focus, contrast]1 . . . t1]
The reader may wonder how we can substantiate the generalization in (1), given that contrastive foci move. Our first argument is based on the prediction that foci should be in complementary distribution in Russian: any sentence can contain only a single focus because all foci compete for the same clause-final position. Even in English, it is hard to construct examples that contain a contrastive and a new information focus, but cooccurrence of contrastive foci seems unproblematic. An example is given in (4a). In this monologue, both John and magazines are intended to be contrastive foci (marked by an A-accent; see Jackendoff 1972). The Russian translation in (4b) is acceptable only on an interpretation and intonation indicative of what Watters (1979) calls counterassertive polar focus: it is the truth value of the utterance that is emphasized (in English, this interpretation requires insertion of emphatic do). Areading in which both John and magazines are contrastive foci (and receive IK2) is impossible, irrespective of surface order. If both John and magazines are to be interpreted as foci, they must occur in different sentences (for example, as in (4c)).
(4)
a. My friends never read anything. Well, that's not...
Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.
This dissertation shows how languages differ in their morphosyntactic sensitivity to variations in the semantics of direct objects. Whereas some languages reflect semantic changes of the direct object in its marking others do not. As a result, we observe mismatches between semantic and morphosyntactic transitivity in the latter type of languages. This becomes particularly clear in a detailed study of the cognate object construction in English. Besides, this dissertation shows that a cross-linguistically uniform phenomenon can be driven by various motivations. This is demonstrated for differential object marking, a cross-linguistically recurrent phenomenon in which direct objects are overtly case marked depending on their semantic features. Two factors appear to govern differential object marking cross-linguistically: prominence-based marking and recoverability of grammatical roles. For some languages only one of these factors can be identified to be of importance, but in other languages, they are simultaneously responsible for object marking. In order to accommodate the full pattern of differential object marking, a bidirectional optimality-theoretic model is developed in which speakers take into account the perspective of the hearer. By doing so, this study shows how typological and optimality theoretical insights can be combined in order to gain more insight in the interaction of the universal principles that guide the marking of direct objects in natural language.
We present two experiments that examine how prior discourse context, and in particular the relative salience of different pieces of information, influences the syntactic structure that a speaker assigns to a subsequent utterance. In a picture description task in two languages (English and Spanish), speakers produced syntactic structures that allowed an entity made salient by a preceding discourse to precede a nonsalient entity. This tendency was stronger when the salient entity was animate than when it was inanimate. We suggest that when discourse makes one entity more salient than another, it temporarily makes that entity more accessible. We propose that such derived accessibility is additive to an entity's inherent accessibility, which is determined by its intrinsic semantic features. We discuss this approach in the light of previous work which emphasizes the importance of information accessibility in syntactic processing (e.g., Bock & Irwin, 1980; Bock & Warren, 1985; McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993; Osgood, 1971; Sridhar, 1988).
Many studies in processing English report that verb information plays a significant role in processing the rest of the sentence (e.g., Boland & Tanenhaus, 1991). Japanese is subject-object-verb (SOV), head-final language with the phenomena of scrambling and phonologically null pronouns. The fact that verb information does not become available until the end of a clause leads one to ask whether other types of information may be utilized in the on-line processing of Japanese. The current study investigated whether word order and case markers play a role. Overall, no effect of word order was observed, even though the frequency of the scrambled sentences was low. Experiment 1 found no extra processing load in processing scrambled sentences. In Experiment 2, no effect of word order was found in the parser's decision making in computing a syntactic structure prior to the verb. On the other hand. Experiment 3 found that the parser was sensitive to the variety of case-marked arguments. The results of the three experiments are more congruent with the nonconfigurational structure than with the configurational structure at the stage of preverbal syntactic processing in Japanese.
Recent studies on Norwegian, German, and English show that the ordering of constituents in transitive sentences depends on their animacy, definiteness, pronominalization and length. It has further been suggested that these properties can be used to predict grammatical functions of NPs. We examine whether these properties play the same role in Russian, a language with a rather free word order and a rich morphologically-marked case system. In a corpus-based study, we analyzed 300 SVO and 300 OVS sentences taken from a novel and a newspaper. The results suggest that animacy and pronominalization can be used to predict the position of constituents, but not their grammatical functions. When the pre-verbal position coincided with the subject position (SVO), the probability of animate NP to be the subject was the same as its probability to be initialized. Pronominalization was a reliable indicator of subjecthood in SVO sentences but a strong predictor of objecthood in OVS sentences. Thus, when case-marking distinguishes between grammatical functions, word order primarily indicates information structure allowing marked constituents in a marked OVS order. This is not taken into account by approaches that use such properties for the disambiguation of grammatical functions.