119 research outputs found

    Towards dialect-inclusive recognition in a low-resource language: are balanced corpora the answer?

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    ASR systems are generally built for the spoken 'standard', and their performance declines for non-standard dialects/varieties. This is a problem for a language like Irish, where there is no single spoken standard, but rather three major dialects: Ulster (Ul), Connacht (Co) and Munster (Mu). As a diagnostic to quantify the effect of the speaker's dialect on recognition performance, 12 ASR systems were trained, firstly using baseline dialect-balanced training corpora, and then using modified versions of the baseline corpora, where dialect-specific materials were either subtracted or added. Results indicate that dialect-balanced corpora do not yield a similar performance across the dialects: the Ul dialect consistently underperforms, whereas Mu yields lowest WERs. There is a close relationship between Co and Mu dialects, but one that is not symmetrical. These results will guide future corpus collection and system building strategies to optimise for cross-dialect performance equity.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2023, Dubli

    The written representation of dialect: with case studies from 20th century Glasgow fiction

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    This thesis deals with and analyses the fictional representation of Glaswegian dialect, and brings to bear on that central issue techniques and concepts from linguistics and from the structure and history of -English. It also pays attention more tangentially to ideological and cultural connotations of matters of dialect. A prominent feature of the dissertation is a characterisation - at all relevant linguistic levels - of the linguistic features of Glaswegian speech, and of the fictional representation of written Glaswegian (with accompanying close analyses of representative extracts).The detailed contents of the thesis deal with the following topics: the relation between language varieties and their components, the different ideological evaluations of the standard variety, the discourse dimension of spoken and written language, the diachronic development of Standard English and Lowland Scots, a synchronic structural description of Glaswegian (including its representation in writing in relation to standard and Scots spelling), and a theoretical model for the analysis of written fictional Glaswegian The source material used for exemplification and analyses is drawn from a range of 201 century Glasgow novels and from some short stories.There is an appendix of word lists. The thesis is also accompanied by materials incorporated in a loose leaf folder inside the back cover. These materials constitute a collection (for ease of reference) of all passages analysed throughout the thesis

    Phonetic variation, sound change, and identity in Scottish Gaelic

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    This thesis examines language variation and change in a context of minority language revitalisation. In particular, I concentrate on young fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic, a minority language of Scotland that is currently undergoing revitalisation. Data from three groups of speakers are presented: older speakers in the Isle of Lewis, a Gaelic heartland area in north-west Scotland; adolescent Gaelic-speakers in Lewis learning the language in immersion schooling; and adolescent Gaelic-speakers in immersion schooling in Glasgow, an urban centre where Gaelic has not traditionally been spoken as a widespread community language. The sociolinguistic analysis examines potential language changes, explores patterns of linguistic variation, and uncovers the role that Gaelic plays in identity formation for each of the participants. In order to gain an insight into the role of Gaelic in different speakers’ lives, I report on ethnographic studies carried out in Lewis and in Glasgow. The phonetic analysis then explores patterns of variation in the production of laterals, vowels, and tone and intonation. The results indicate large differences between the speech of older and adolescent speakers in Lewis, while differences between young speakers in Lewis and Glasgow suggest that Glasgow Gaelic is developing as a phonetically and socially distinct variety of the language. For example, older speakers in Lewis speak Gaelic as a partial tone language, unlike young people in Lewis and in Glasgow. Differences are also present between young people in Lewis and in Glasgow, such as in the acoustics of the vowel [ʉ], the production of the lateral system, and intonation patterns. The developments detailed in this thesis are the result of a complex interaction between the internal sound structure of Gaelic, language contact with varieties of English, identity construction, and differing conceptions of the self. All of these factors are conditioned by the status of Gaelic as a minority endangered and revitalised language. In exploring these avenues, I advance an account of language variation and change and apply it to a context of minority language revitalisation

    TAG QUESTIONS IN ENGLISH. A SYNTACTIC, PRAGMATIC AND PROSODIC ACCOUNT

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    La presente Tesi di Dottorato affronta l’analisi di in fenomeno tipico della lingua Inglese, quello delle tag questions. Nel capitolo 1 si descrive tale fenomeno linguistico dal punto di vista sintattico, fornendo una classificazione dei vari tipi di domande coda in base al criterio della polarità; ma si prendono in esame anche altri casi di tag ‘invarianti’ (ad es. ok?, innit?, right?), prestando attenzione agli aspetti sociolinguistici che ne determinano l’uso – i.e. sia diatopici che diastratici – ed esaminando particolari strutture che spesso vengono seguite da tags, come gli imperativi, gli esortativi e le frasi ellittiche. Nel capitolo 2 vengono descritte le varie funzioni delle tag questions, in base alla diversa struttura sintattica, all’intonazione e al contesto situazionale. Il capitolo 3 ù volto all’analisi di tags presenti in 4 films in lingua inglese, sia dal punto di vista sintattico che funzionale, dando rilievo al tipo di intonazione di queste. L’analisi ù suffragata da numerosi spettrogrammi, grafici e statistiche. Infine il capitolo 4 si propone di analizzare dati in inglese reale, tratti da un corpus di lingua parlata spontanea nella varietà Irlandese

    Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

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    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

    Syntax inside the grammar

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    This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions on the relation of syntax to other aspects of grammar and linguistics more generally, including studies on language acquisition, variation and change, and syntactic interfaces. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax ranging from the core verbal domain to higher, propositional domains

    Syntactic architecture and its consequences I

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    This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions on the relation of syntax to other aspects of grammar and linguistics more generally, including studies on language acquisition, variation and change, and syntactic interfaces. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax ranging from the core verbal domain to higher, propositional domains. This book is complemented by volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/276 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/277

    The perception and production of stress and intonation by children with cochlear implants

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    Users of current cochlear implants have limited access to pitch information and hence to intonation in speech. This seems likely to have an important impact on prosodic perception. This thesis examines the perception and production of the prosody of stress in children with cochlear implants. The interdependence of perceptual cues to stress (pitch, timing and loudness) in English is well documented and each of these is considered in analyses of both perception and production. The subject group comprised 17 implanted (CI) children aged 5;7 to 16;11 and using ACE or SPEAK processing strategies. The aims are to establish (i) the extent to which stress and intonation are conveyed to CI children in synthesised bisyllables (BAba vs. baBA) involving controlled changes in F0, duration and amplitude (Experiment I), and in natural speech involving compound vs. phrase stress and focus (Experiment II). (ii) when pitch cues are missing or are inaudible to the listeners, do other cues such as loudness or timing contribute to the perception of stress and intonation? (iii) whether CI subjects make appropriate use of F0, duration and amplitude to convey linguistic focus in speech production (Experiment III). Results of Experiment I showed that seven of the subjects were unable to reliably hear pitch differences of 0.84 octaves. Most of the remaining subjects required a large (approx 0.5 octave) difference to reliably hear a pitch change. Performance of the CI children was poorer than that of a normal hearing group of children presented with an acoustic cochlear implant simulation. Some of the CI children who could not discriminate F0 differences in Experiment I nevertheless scored above chance in tests involving focus in natural speech in Experiment II. Similarly, some CI subjects who were above chance in the production of appropriate F0 contours in Experiment III could not hear F0 differences of 0.84 octaves. These results suggest that CI children may not necessarily rely on F0 cues to stress, and in the absence of F0 or amplitude cues, duration may provide an alternative cue

    The Language of Paul Muldoon

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    This book interprets the multifarious writing of the Irish-American word wizard, Paul Muldoon, who has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War’. Readership: All interested in poetry and writing from Ireland and the English-speaking world, and in the enigma of language
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