Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody

Melody as Prosody: Toward a Usage-Based Theory of Music

MELODY AS PROSODY: TOWARD A USAGE-BASED THEORY OF MUSIC Thomas M. Pooley Gary A. Tomlinson Rationalist modes of inquiry have dominated the cognitive science of music over the past several decades. This dissertation contests many rationalist assumptions, including its core tenets of nativism, modularity, and computationism, by drawing on a wide range of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive music theory, as well as original data from a case study of Zulu song prosody. An alternative biocultural approach to the study of music and mind is outlined that takes account of musical diversity by attending to shared cognitive mechanisms. Grammar emerges through use, and cognitive categories are learned and constructed in particular social contexts. This usage-based theory of music shows how domain-general cognitive mechanisms for patterning-finding and intention-reading are crucial to acquisition, and how Gestalt principles are invoked in perception. Unlike generative and other rationalist approaches that focus on a series of idealizations, and the cognitive `competences\u27 codified in texts and musical scores, the usage-based approach investigates actual performances in everyday contexts by using instrumental measures of process. The study focuses on song melody because it is a property of all known musics. Melody is used for communicative purposes in both song and speech. Vocalized pitch patterning conveys a wide range of affective, propositional, and syntactic information through prosodic features that are shared by the two domains. The study of melody as prosody shows how gradient pitch features are crucial to the design and communicative functions of song melodies. The prosodic features shared by song and speech include: speech tone, intonation, and pitch-accent. A case study of ten Zulu memulo songs shows that pitch is not used in the discrete or contrastive fashion proposed by many cognitive music theorists and most (generative) phonologists. Instead there are a range of pitch categories that include pitch targets, glides, and contours. These analyses also show that song melody has a multi-dimensional pitch structure, and that it is a dynamic adaptive system that is irreducible in its complexity

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)

Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar- based approaches to prosody. Trough four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody. About the Author: Francesco Cangemi Francesco Cangemi (1983) studied Literature and Philology in Naples, completing his undergraduate studies with a published MA dissertation on vowel systems in southern Italian dialects. After receiving his PhD in Linguistics from Aix-Marseille University with a thesis on underspecification in prosodic categories, he is currently working as a post-doc researcher in Cologne, focussing on the encoding and decoding of linguistic prominence, and in Zürich, focussing on morphosyntactic agreement in Italian dialects