To Predict or to Memorize: Prominence in Inaugural Addresses

The assignment of phrasal prominence has been variously attributed to syntactic structure, part of speech, predictability, informativity, and speaker's intent. A recent account asserts that prominence is memorized on a by-word basis as Accent Ratio (AR), the likelihood that a word is accented (Nenkova et al. 2007). We examined whether AR outperforms the traditional predictors, in particular syntax and informativity, and if not, whether the traditional predictors shed light on the variance left unexplained by AR. We used a corpus of spoken American English consisting of the first inaugural addresses of six recent American presidents, hand-annotated for stress by two native English speakers. Regression models fitted to the data revealed that AR, syntax, and informativity all independently matter. Dividing the data into high-prominence and low-prominence tokens further revealed that AR and informativity are significant among low-prominence words, but only syntax is significant among high-prominence words. We conclude that although AR is a highly successful predictor, certain aspects of phrasal prominence require reference to syntax and informativity

Paradoxes of MaxEnt markedness

Over the past two decades, theoretical linguistics has taken a probabilistic turn. Maximum entropy (ME) has been endorsed as a model of probabilistic phonology because of its classical guarantees for grammatical inference. Yet, little is known about the basic organizing principles of ME phonology beyond circumstantial evidence of ME’s ability to fit specific patterns of empirical frequencies. The study of ME typologies is difficult because they consist of infinitely many grammars that cannot be exhaustively listed and directly inspected. Uniform Probability Inequalities (Anttila and Magri 2018) are a new tool that solves the problem: they characterize cases where one phonological mapping has a probability smaller than another mapping and this probability inequality holds uniformly for every grammar in the typology. In other words, uniform probability inequalities are universals of probabilistic grammars. We present a new generalization about ME uniform probability inequalities and argue that they are phonologically paradoxical and prune the set of ME universals down to almost nothing. This suggests that ME is not a suitable model of phonology

Affective blocs : Understanding affective polarization in multiparty systems

Research has suggested that affective polarization (AP)—the extent to which partisans view each other as a disliked out-group—has increased, especially in two-party political systems such as in the US. The understanding of AP in multiparty systems remains limited. We study AP in Finland, characterized by a strong multiparty system and a low level of ideological polarization, between 2007 and 2019. We find that AP has increased, driven mainly by voters evaluating their least favorite party more negatively. We also propose an approach that goes beyond earlier literature, which has mostly used a single aggregate metric to measure AP. Using latent profile analysis, we find that voters are grouped into blocs that view some parties positively and others negatively. This suggests that the complex dynamics of AP in multiparty democracies involve relationships between not just individual parties but between what we call affective blocs that span across party lines.Peer reviewe

On the Phonology and Semantics of Deaccentuation

The deaccentuation of given and/or repeated elements is familiar from many dialects of English. We propose that deaccentuation is essentially an optional postlexical phonological process of stress retraction triggered by two constraints: *Stress-Copy, which assigns a violation to a stress peak on a word with a segmentally identical copy in the left context, and Rightmost, which assigns a violation to every word between a stress peak and the right phrase edge. We quantify deaccentuation by defining it as being perceived with less stress than expected, where expected stress is calculated by an implementation of Liberman and Prince's (1977) phrasal stress algorithm. We provide empirical evidence for our analysis based on the first inaugurals of six former U.S. presidents

Equiprobable Mappings in Weighted Constraint Grammars

We show that MaxEnt is so rich that it can distinguish between any two different input-output mappings: there always exists a nonnegative weight vector that assigns them different MaxEnt probabilities. Stochastic HG instead does admit equiprobable mappings, namely mappings that have the same probability for every weight vector, and we give a complete formal characterization of their violation profiles. Empirically, we show that the predictions of MaxEnt and Stochastic HG differ for a grammar of Finnish secondary stress. We test the predictions of both models against a large internet corpus and find preliminary support for Stochastic HG and against MaxEnt

Does MaxEnt Overgenerate? Implicational Universals in Maximum Entropy Grammar

A good linguistic theory should neither undergenerate (i.e., it should not miss any attested patterns) nor overgenerate (i.e., it should not predict any "unattestable" patterns). We investigate the question of overgeneration in Maximum Entropy Grammar (ME) in the context of basic syllabification (Prince and Smolensky 2004) and obstruent voicing (Lombardi 1999), using the theory's T-order as a measure of typological strength. We find that ME has non-trivial T-orders, but compared to OT and HG, they are relatively sparse and sometimes linguistically counterintuitive. The fact that many reasonable implicational universals fail under ME suggests that the theory overgenerates, at least in the two phonological examples we examine. More generally, our results serve as a reminder that linguistic theories should be evaluated in terms of both descriptive fit and explanatory depth. A good theory succeeds on both fronts: we want a flexible theory that best fits the data, but we also want an informative theory that excludes unnatural patterns and derives the correct implicational universals