Notions of focus anaphoricity

This article reviews some of the theoretical notions and empirical phenomena which figure in current formal-semantic theories of focus. It also develops the connection between “alternative semantics” and “givenness” accounts of focus interpretation

Epistemic NP Modifiers

The paper considers participles such as "unknown", "identified" and "unspecified", which in sentences such as "Solange is staying in an unknown hotel" have readings equivalent to an indirect question "Solange is staying in a hotel, and it is not known which hotel it is." We discuss phenomena including disambiguation of quantifier scope and a restriction on the set of determiners which allow the reading in question. Epistemic modifiers are analyzed in a DRT framework with file (information state) discourse referents. The proposed semantics uses a predication on files and discourse referents which is related to recent developments in dynamic modal predicate calculus. It is argued that a compositional DRT semantics must employ a semantic type of discourse referents, as opposed to just a type of individuals. A connection is developed between the scope effects of epistemic modifiers and the scope-disambiguating effect of "a certain".Comment: Final pre-publication version, 27 pages, Postscript. Final version appears in the proceedings of SALT VI

Using a Probabilistic Class-Based Lexicon for Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

This paper presents the use of probabilistic class-based lexica for disambiguation in target-word selection. Our method employs minimal but precise contextual information for disambiguation. That is, only information provided by the target-verb, enriched by the condensed information of a probabilistic class-based lexicon, is used. Induction of classes and fine-tuning to verbal arguments is done in an unsupervised manner by EM-based clustering techniques. The method shows promising results in an evaluation on real-world translations.Comment: 7 pages, uses colacl.st

A recursive phonology interface for WH-F alternative semantics

Slides and poster from Semantics and Linguistic Theory 21, Rutgers University, May 20-22, 2011.The presentation presents an analysis of intonational focus and focused in-situ WH phrases that couples the projection of alternatives in alternative semantics for focus with phonological prominence in a stress-F account of the phonology interface for focus.NSF BCS 103515

A corpus search methodology for focus realization

Poster presentation, 157th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Abstract appears in J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 125, Issue 4, pp. 2573-2573.We describe a methodology for investigating the semantic-grammatical conditioning and phonetic realization of contrastive intonation using a web harvest of particular word strings followed by grammatical and acoustic analysis. A commercial audio web search engine using speech recognition retrieved 179 MP3 files purportedly containing a token of the string 'than I did.' In this comparative clause fragment, contrastive focus commonly falls on the subject 'she did more than I_F did' , on 'did', 'I wish I had done more than I did_F', or following 'I said more now than I did before_F' . The 96 true tokens of 'than I did' were classified into the categories 'subject', 'did', and 'following' by grammatical and semantic criteria. For each token, 5 segment intervals were hand-annotated and more than 300 acoustic parameters extracted using a Praat script. SVM machine learning classifiers were trained that identify focus classes by acoustic criteria. On a 10-fold crossvalidation test, the classifier achieves 90.2% accuracy in discriminating the dominant 'subject' and 'following' classes. In a listening task, human subjects achieved comparable accuracy of 90.3 given only the acoustic target 'than I did'. Stepwise logistic regression revealed measures of duration, f0, intensity, formants, and formant bandwidths among the significant factors