Contrastive focus

The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of "contrastive focus", "kontrast" (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or "identificational focus" (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis

On the prosodic marking of contrast in Romance sentence topic: evidence from Neapolitan Italian

International audienceIn this paper we present data in Neapolitan Italian that show a clear phonological difference in intonation between a clitic left dislocated object topic in an exhaustive answer and in a partial answer. In the latter, the topic expression is set aside in its own prosodic phrase, made of a rising accent (H*) followed by a !H- boundary tone. An exhaustive answer does not show such phrasing pattern. The finding of a 'partial' tune in Romance provides a solution to the pragmatic problem of defining sentence topic by supporting a bi-dimensional model of Information Structure

Contrastive Parallelism in European Portuguese: Prosodic features of a coehesion mechanism

This paper focuses on the encoding of contrast in European Portuguese (EP), specifically by analysing contrastive parallelism structures, which seem to be crucial in the construction of the type of discourse that will be analysed: the argumentative discourse. Hence, my main goal is discussing how contrast is prosodically encoded in these structures and to relate the results with previous ones for other languages. The data show that contrastive parallelism has specific acoustic properties and that there is no one-to-one relation between pitch accents and these structures. Therefore, the results seem to indicate that the prosodic encoding of such structures is gradient.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Contrastive focus and emphasis

The paper puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví-Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as involving the introduction and subsequent exclusion of alternatives. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-semantic notions like ‘hearer expectation’ or ‘discourse expectability’ of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected the focus content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark the focus constituent by means of special grammatical devices, thus giving rise to emphasis

Quantifier scope in sentence prosody? : A view from production

Logical scope interpretation and sentence prosody exhibit intricate, yet scarcely studied interrelations across a variety of languages and constructions. Despite these observable interrelations, it is not clear whether quantifier scope by itself is able to directly affect prosodic form. Information structure is a key potential confounding factor, as it appears to richly interact both with scope interpretation and with prosodic form. To address this complication, the current study investigates, based on data from Hungarian, whether quantifier scope is expressed prosodically if information structure is kept in check. A production experiment is presented that investigates grammatically scope ambiguous doubly quantified sentences with varied focus structures, while lacking a syntactically marked topic or focus. In contrast to the information structural manipulation, which is manifest in the analysis of the acoustic data, the results reveal no prosodic effect of quantifier scope, nor the interaction of scope with information structure. This finding casts doubt on the notion that logical scope can receive direct prosodic expression, and it indirectly corroborates the restrictive view instead that scope interpretation is encoded in prosody only in cases in which it is a free rider on information structure

Contrastive prosody and the subsequent mention of alternatives during discourse processing

Linguistic research has long viewed prosody as an important indicator of information structure in intonationally rich languages like English. Correspondingly, numerous psycholinguistic studies have shown significant effects of prosody, particularly with respect to the immediate processing of a prosodically prominent phrase. Although co-reference resolution is known to be influenced by information structure, it has been less clear whether prosodic prominence can affect decisions about next mention in a discourse, and if so, how. We present results from an open-ended story continuation task, conducted as part of a series of experiments that examine how prosody influences the anticipation and resolution of co-reference. Overall results from the project suggest that prosodic prominence can increase or decrease reference to a saliently pitch-accented phrase, depending on additional circumstances of the referential decision. We argue that an adequate account of prosody’s role in co-reference requires consideration of how the processing system interfaces with multiple levels of linguistic representation

Intonation in Luo

This thesis investigates the intonation of Luo. It shows how intonation distinguishes sentences. It also investigates how information structure (i.e. focus, dislocations and topics) is intonationally cued in a sentence. The aim is to establish the phonological and phonetic representation of Luo intonation by examining the factors that contribute to the observed F0 contours. Data were collected in Rorya and Tarime districts in Tanzania, where Luo is predominantly spoken. The materials designed comprise of scripted Luo sentences, Swahili sentences to be translated into Luo and picture-based tasks. The analysis is based on the Auto-segmental metrical theory which maps phonological elements to continuous acoustic parameters (Ladd, 1996, 2008). It is found that Luo is a tone-terracing language with four lexical tones: High, Low, Falling and Rising. The observed downtrends are downstep, declination and final lowering. Downstep is the most significant process, contrasting automatic and non-automatic downstep. The latter has no evidence of floating L and thus attributed to right edge boundary effect. Declination is observed in all-High and all-Low tone sequences, as a phonetic effect. Final lowering is also observed as a final effect in both declaratives and questions. Downstep is also a final effect triggered by a boundary L%. Questions are produced with Pitch Range Expansion triggered by a left edge -H intonational tone. There is no prominence on focused constituents but focus constructions are produced with a higher register. Luo dislocations are asymmetrical, with right dislocations phrased with the main clause while left dislocations are phrased separately from the main clause. Complex clauses, except complementizer clauses, are recursive

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Information structure and the prosodic structure of English : a probabilistic relationship

This work concerns how information structure is signalled prosodically in English, that is, how prosodic prominence and phrasing are used to indicate the salience and organisation of information in relation to a discourse model. It has been standardly held that information structure is primarily signalled by the distribution of pitch accents within syntax structure, as well as intonation event type. However, we argue that these claims underestimate the importance, and richness, of metrical prosodic structure and its role in signalling information structure. We advance a new theory, that information structure is a strong constraint on the mapping of words onto metrical prosodic structure. We show that focus (kontrast) aligns with nuclear prominence, while other accents are not usually directly 'meaningful'. Information units (theme/rheme) try to align with prosodic phrases. This mapping is probabilistic, so it is also influenced by lexical and syntactic effects, as well as rhythmical constraints and other features including emphasis. Rather than being directly signalled by the prosody, the likelihood of each information structure interpretation is mediated by all these properties. We demonstrate that this theory resolves problematic facts about accent distribution in earlier accounts and makes syntactic focus projection rules unnecessary. Previous theories have claimed that contrastive accents are marked by a categorically distinct accent type to other focal accents (e.g. L+H* v H*). We show this distinction in fact involves two separate semantic properties: contrastiveness and theme/rheme status. Contrastiveness is marked by increased prominence in general. Themes are distinguished from rhemes by relative prominence, i.e. the rheme kontrast aligns with nuclear prominence at the level of phrasing that includes both theme and rheme units. In a series of production and perception experiments, we directly test our theory against previous accounts, showing that the only consistent cue to the distinction between theme and rheme nuclear accents is relative pitch height. This height difference accords with our understanding of the marking of nuclear prominence: theme peaks are only lower than rheme peaks in rheme-theme order, consistent with post-nuclear lowering; in theme-rheme order, the last of equal peaks is perceived as nuclear. The rest of the thesis involves analysis of a portion of the Switchboard corpus which we have annotated with substantial new layers of semantic (kontrast) and prosodic features, which are described. This work is an essentially novel approach to testing discourse semantics theories in speech. Using multiple regression analysis, we demonstrate distributional properties of the corpus consistent with our claims. Plain and nuclear accents are best distinguished by phrasal features, showing the strong constraint of phrase structure on the perception of prominence. Nuclear accents can be reliably predicted by semantic/syntactic features, particularly kontrast, while other accents cannot. Plain accents can only be identified well by acoustic features, showing their appearance is linked to rhythmical and low-level semantic features. We further show that kontrast is not only more likely in nuclear position, but also if a word is more structurally or acoustically prominent than expected given its syntactic/information status properties. Consistent with our claim that nuclear accents are distinctive, we show that pre-, post- and nuclear accents have different acoustic profiles; and that the acoustic correlates of increased prominence vary by accent type, i.e. pre-nuclear or nuclear. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our theory compared to previous accounts using examples from the corpus