Intonation and Syntax in Spoken Language Systems

Phrasal intonation is notorious for a tendency to perceptually segment the word-string of a spoken utterance into groups which may violate orthodox syntactic notions of constituency. For example, the normal prosody for the answer (b) to the following question (a) imposes the intonational constituency indicated by the brackets (stress, marked in this case by raised pitch, is indicated by capit als) : (1) a. I know that brassicas are a good source of minerals, but what are LEGumes a good source of? b. (LEGumes are a good source of) VITamins . Such a grouping cuts across the traditional syntactic structure of the sentence. The presence of two apparently uncoupled levels of structure in natural language grammar appears to complicate the path from speech to interpretation unreasonably, and to thereby threaten a number of computational applications in speech recognition and and speech synthesis

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Questioning and responding in Italian

Questions are design problems for both the questioner and the addressee. They must be produced as recognizable objects and must be comprehended by taking into account the context in which they occur and the local situated interests of the participants. This paper investigates how people do ‘questioning’ and ‘responding’ in Italian ordinary conversations. I focus on the features of both questions and responses. I first discuss formal linguistic features that are peculiar to questions in terms of intonation contours (e.g. final rise), morphology (e.g. tags and question words) and syntax (e.g. inversion). I then show additional features that characterize their actual implementation in conversation such as their minimality (often the subject or the verb is only implied) and the usual occurrence of speaker gaze towards the recipient during questions. I then look at which social actions (e.g. requests for information, requests for confirmation) the different question types implement and which responses are regularly produced in return. The data shows that previous descriptions of “interrogative markings” are neither adequate nor sufficient to comprehend the actual use of questions in natural conversation

Cappadocian in the social media era

Until very recently, Cappadocian Greek seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and dialectologists even believed it had become extinct altogether. However, one Cappadocian variety, Mišótika, is still spoken in some villages and towns in the decentralized administrations of Macedonia and Thrace, Epirus and Western Macedonia, and Thessaly and Central Greece. The dialect is undergoing attrition under the growing pressure of Standard Modern Greek and its regional varieties and is actually being re-Hellenized. Even the oldest speakers make free use of Greek instead of Misiótika words and expressions and attrition is noticeable in at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. As a result, there are now many semi- or even would-be speakers whose speech is located somewhere on a continuum from Mišótika with Standard or Regional Modern Greek elements in it to Standard or Regional Modern Greek with Mišótika elements in it - in both cases mostly words and phrases. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Mišótika as a marker of (Mišótika) Cappadocian identity. Speakers feel more confident to speak their language in public, for instance at the annual Gavoustima, where theatrical plays in Mišótika are now regularly performed by the syllogos of Néo Agionéri (to the amusement and also to bewilderment of the audience). Remarkably and very fortunately, Mišótika is now also used in the Social Media. I will concentrate here on Facebook, especially on the page called Έναρξη Διδασκαλίας Εκµάθησης Μυστιώτικου Ιδιώµατος ( group 470281169768316 on FB). The title is identical with the subtitle of Thomas Fates’ book Χ͜ιογός α ας χαρίσ̌’, which is some sort of “Teach Yourself Mišótika” and in which, interestingly, a special orthography for Mišótika has been developed. I will discuss the kind of information found on the FB page: questions, questionnaires, explanations of words and short phrases, folktales and other short stories, audio & video clips etc. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of using the Greek alphabet to write Mišótika in relation to the ongoing phonological attrition and also to the insecurity when it comes to interpretation linguistic phenomena in Mišótika

RRL: A Rich Representation Language for the Description of Agent Behaviour in NECA

In this paper, we describe the Rich Representation Language (RRL) which is used in the NECA system. The NECA system generates interactions between two or more animated characters. The RRL is a formal framework for representing the information that is exchanged at the interfaces between the various NECA system modules

Topic in dialogue: prosodic and syntactic features

In this paper we investigate the relationship between phonetic phrasing, tonal pattern and phrase structure in left peripherical sentence topic. Our corpus consists of three task-oriented Italian dialogues. The results of prosodic analysis show that topics are usually associated to the highest pitch values in the Tone Unit, regardless to their actual syntactic position. Syntactic analysis shows that, while topic phrase structure is rather variable, topic function is quite stable, i.e., topics have mostly circumstantial-locative function, and less frequently subject function. Finally, phonetic phrasing, prominence placement and phrase structure shows clearly regular relationships