L'adquisició de l'entonació en català, castellà i anglès

El principal objectiu del projecte és analitzar el desenvolupament de l’entonació de tres llengües, el català, el castellà i l’anglès. Pretenem investigar el desenvolupament dels diferents patrons entonatius que trobem en la producció primerenca, avaluant si, efectivament, aquests primers contorns produïts pels nens reflecteixen o no les propietats prosòdiques específiques de la llengua input dels adults. En resum, l'objectiu és poder esbrinar com l'infant va configurant la seva gramàtica entonativa així com el significat que va associat a aquestes produccions entonatives. Pretenem analitzar dos tipus de dades. Per una banda, un corpus d’entonació que conté els diàlegs controlats entre 36 nens i 36 adults (12 nens de cada llengua de 2, 4 i 6 anys) i que permet de comparar les mateixes frases produïdes pels adults i pels nens. Per altra banda, els corpus longitudinals de CHILDES que ens permeten analitzar dades sobre actes de parla i formes entonatives (corpus Serra-Solé per al català, corpus Ornat i Llinàs-Ojea per al castellà i el corpus Providence per a l'anglès americà i el Forrester per a l'anglès britànic).The main goal of this project is to investigate the development of the prosodic and intonation pattern in three languages, namely Catalan, Spanish and English. We intend to investigate the development of a variety of intonation patterns that found early in the production, assessing whether the production of these first contours produced by children reflect the specific prosodic properties of the input language. In summary, the main goal is to find out how the child sets up his or her intonational grammar and whether he/she is able to associate intonational contours with specific pragmatics meanings. We will analyze two types of data. On the one hand, a corpus containing target dialogues among 36 children and 36 adults (12 children in each language of 2, 4 and 6 years). This type of database allows for a strict comparison between target sentences produced by adults and by children. Furthermore, several corpus containing longitudinal data (and available in CHILDES) will allow us to analyze speech acts and intonation forms (e.g., Serra-Solé corpus for Catalan, López Ornat and Ojea-Llinàs for Spanish and Forrester corpus for British English

Introducció monogràfic sobre «Entonació dialectal»

Introducció al monogràfic sobre «Entonació dialectal» del número 49 (Tardor 2010) de Caplletra. Revista Internacional de Filologia

Intonational meaning

Traditionally, prosodic studies have focused on the study of intonational form and the study of intonational meaning has been relatively neglected. Similarly, the fields of semantics and pragmatics have paid little attention to the pragmatic uses of intonation. As a result, there is no firm agreement within the linguistic community on how to integrate the analysis of intonational meaning across languages into a unified prosodic, semantic, and pragmatic approach. This article provides an overview of the literature on intonational meaning, describing the recent advances made in the fields of prosody, semantics/pragmatics, and syntax. Several theoretical approaches to explaining the semantics and pragmatics of intonation are presented. A common feature to most frameworks is that intonation (1) should be regarded as an integral part of linguistic grammar; and (2) typically encodes meanings related to the modal aspect of propositions. However, features such as compositionality, duality of structure, and context-dependency are still hotly debated issues. These features will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives, and we will identify potential advances related to the full integration of intonational meaning into dynamic and multidimensional models of meaning.This research has been fundedby a grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2012-31995 ‘Gestures, prosody and linguistic structure’), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group

Intonational meaning

Traditionally, prosodic studies have focused on the study of intonational form and the study of intonational meaning has been relatively neglected. Similarly, the fields of semantics and pragmatics have paid little attention to the pragmatic uses of intonation. As a result, there is no firm agreement within the linguistic community on how to integrate the analysis of intonational meaning across languages into a unified prosodic, semantic, and pragmatic approach. This article provides an overview of the literature on intonational meaning, describing the recent advances made in the fields of prosody, semantics/pragmatics, and syntax. Several theoretical approaches to explaining the semantics and pragmatics of intonation are presented. A common feature to most frameworks is that intonation (1) should be regarded as an integral part of linguistic grammar; and (2) typically encodes meanings related to the modal aspect of propositions. However, features such as compositionality, duality of structure, and context-dependency are still hotly debated issues. These features will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives, and we will identify potential advances related to the full integration of intonational meaning into dynamic and multidimensional models of meaning.This research has been fundedby a grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2012-31995 ‘Gestures, prosody and linguistic structure’), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group

Compensatory lengthening by vowel and consonant loss in early Friulian

The majority of Romanists have recognized that the Romance languages that have developed a length conirast in the vocalic system have done so through a process called open-syllable lengthening, that is, stressed vowels in open syllables automatically lengthened (Lausberg (1985). However, this is not the case in northern Italian dialects like Friulian or Milanese, where we observe contrasts like the following: FINITU > [finí:t] vs. FINITA > [finíde]. What has traditionally been interpreted in the Friulian case is that vowels lengthened before word-final voiced consonants. This article shows that the lengthening process attested in Early Friulian is better understood if we adopt a moraic conception of the syllable and syllabic weight. It is proposed that vowel lengthening is triggered by the loss of the final vowels: while FINITU deletes the last vowel and compensates the preceding vowel, FINITA does not drop the final vowel and, consequently, the vowel remains short

Introducció monogràfic sobre «Entonació dialectal»

Introducció al monogràfic sobre «Entonació dialectal» del número 49 (Tardor 2010) de Caplletra. Revista Internacional de Filologia

Prosody signals the emergence of intentional communication in the first year of life: evidence from Catalan-babbling infants

There is considerable debate about whether early vocalizations mimic the target language and whether prosody signals emergent intentional communication. A longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants was analyzed to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations and to express intentionality. A total of 2,701 vocalizations from 0;7 to 0;11 were coded acoustically (by marking pitch range and duration), gesturally, and pragmatically (by marking communicative status and specific pragmatic function). The results showed that communicative vocalizations were shorter and had a wider pitch range than investigative vocalizations and that these patterns in communicative vocalizations depended on the intention of the vocalizations: requests and expressions of discontent displayed wider pitch range and longer duration than responses or statements. These results support the hypothesis that babbling children can successfully use a set of prosodic patterns to signal intentional speech.This research has been funded by the following 5 grants: two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, ‘The role of tonal scaling and tonal alignment in distinguishing intonational categories in Catalan and Spanish’ (FFI2009-07648/FILO), and ‘Gestures, prosody and linguistic structure’ (FFI2012-31995); a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Grup d'Estudis de Prosòdia (2009SGR-701); the grant RECERCAIXA 2012 for the project ‘Els precursors del llenguatge. Una guia TIC per a pares i educadors’ awarded by Obra Social ‘La Caixa’ and the grant Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (CSD2007-00012)

The Effects of pitch accentuation and beat gestures on information recall in contrastive discourse

Comunicació presentada a: Speech Prosody 2016, celebrada del 31 de maig al 3 de juny de 2016 a Boston, Estats Units.Research in audiovisual prosody has shown that typically beat gestures are temporally integrated with prominent positions in speech (e.g., [1, 2]). There is independent evidence that both prosodic prominence (e.g., pitch accents) and gestural prominence associated with words (e.g., beat gestures) facilitate the recall of information (e.g., [3, 4, 5]). However, previous studies did not directly compare the beneficial effects of pitch accentuation without beats with pitch accentuation with beats. This study investigates the role of prosodic prominence (pitch accents) and gesture prominence (beat gestures) on the recall of contrastive information in natural discourse. Twenty Catalan-dominant native speakers were asked to watch 48 short videotaped discourses each containing two contrast sets with two items (e.g., The fish shop and the grocery shop). The critical word in the sequence was presented under two experimental conditions: 1) accompanied by prosodic prominence (L+H* pitch accent); and 2) accompanied by prosodic prominence and gestural prominence (L+H* pitch accent + beat). The results of the recall task revealed that the presence of beat gestures associated with prosodic prominence favored word recall of contrastive information in discourse in comparison with the condition without beat gestures.This research would not have been possible without funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant FFI2012- 31995 (“Gestures, prosody and linguistic structure”), and a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group. The first author also acknowledges a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya AGAUR (2015 FI_B 00094)

The Encoding of epistemic operations in two Romance languages: intonation and pragmatic markers

Comunicació presentada a: Speech Prosody 2016, celebrada del 31 de maig al 3 de juny de 2016 a Boston, Estats Units.For years linguists have noted that intonation patterns encode similar meanings as sentence-final discourse particles across languages. A question that arises is what is the division of labor between the two and whether we find a compensatory distribution between the two kinds of systems. In this article, we focus on two languages within the Romance group (Catalan and Friulian) which have been reported to use intonation and discourse particles to different extents to mark epistemic meanings. Thirty speakers were asked to participate in a Discourse Completion Task designed to elicit statements with several degrees of speaker commitment. The results show that Catalan and Friulian display an asymmetry in the marking of epistemically-biased statements: while Catalan uses a greater variety of stance-marking intonation contours, Friulian uses a more varied set of stance modal particles and a more restricted set of intonation contours. However, both languages make use epistemic adverbs together with intonation and place restrictions on how pragmatic particles and intonation are paired, indicating that the relationship between the two systems can be quite complex. Overall, we claim that dynamic semantic models enable us to integrate the study of intonational meaning with other parts of the grammar into a unified approach.This research has been funded by a research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2012-31995 “Gestures, prosody, and linguistic structure”), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group