Givenness and Locality

Language and Cognitive Processes

Watson

2010

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252

216

Research on prosody has recently become an important focus in various disciplines, including Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science. This article reviews recent research advances on two key issues: prosodic phrasing and prosodic prominence. Both aspects of prosody are influenced by linguistic factors such as syntactic constituent structure, semantic relations, phonological rhythm, pragmatic considerations, and also by processing factors such as the length, complexity or predictability of linguistic material. Our review summarizes recent insights into the production and perception of these two components of prosody and their grammatical underpinnings. While this review only covers a subset of a broader set of research topics on prosody in cognitive science, they are representative of a tendency in the field toward a more interdisciplinary approach.

Section: Prosodic Prominencementioning

confidence: 64%

“…Rooth’s theory has the nice property that it accounts for different kinds of focus phenomena, such as question-answer congruence, contrastive stress, and givenness-marking with a single formalism. Variations of this type of approach were presented in Schwarzschild (1999), Büring (2003), and Wagner (2006).…”

Section: Prosodic Prominencementioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review

Language and Cognitive Processes

Watson

2010

Self Cite

252

216

“…In English, as in French, there are focus operators that differ in their syntax. The operator only seems to be able to attach to constituents of various types (Rooth 1985;Wagner 2006), while the focus-sensitive operator always can only attach in the adverbial position. Perhaps ~ in English is more like only in its syntactic distribution, while ~ in French is more like English always (see Wagner 2006).…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic focus in English vs. French: A scope account

Klok

Goad

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

2018

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We compare the use of prosodic prominence in English and French to convey focus. While previous studies have found these languages, and Germanic vs. Romance more generally, to differ in their use of prominence to encode focus (e.g., Ladd 1990;1996;Lambrecht 1994;Cruttenden 1997;, exactly what underlies the difference remains an open question. We investigate two possibilities: The difference between the languages could be due to a difference in their phonology, restricting the circumstances in which material can be prosodically reduced, as proposed in Féry (2014). Alternatively, there could be syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic differences concerning when prominence can be used to encode focus. We compare these hypotheses in a production study which varied the type of focus context (corrective, contrastive, parallelism) to establish the contextual conditions on when a shift in prosodic prominence can occur. The results confirm earlier claims that French uses prosodic prominence to encode focus in corrections, but fails to prosodically encode other types of focus, in contrast to English. We further find that French and English encode focus with very similar acoustic means. Our results show that both languages have the phonological/phonetic means to encode focus using prominence shifts, but differ with respect to the semantic and pragmatic circumstances in which they use them. We propose that these semantic/pragmatic differences between English and French are a result of differences in the syntactic scope possibilities of the focus operator involved in prosodic focus marking.

“…To our knowledge, there has been no attempt in the prior literature to try to explain the data originally used to motivate focus theory in terms of accessibility. Another problem for accessibility approaches is that deciding whether an altern ative is suitable requires pragmatic reasoning (Buring, 2008;Katzir, 2013;Wagner, 2006 Wagner (2010) reports that speakers in a production study systematically shift prominence to the adjective in cases in which there is a contextually salient mutually exclusive alternative, as in (19c). Although these two referential expressions encode given informa tion in (b), a rendition with an unaccented Sue and main prominence on John seems infelicitous.…”

Section: Interim Summary: Two Types O F Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessibility is no alternative to alternatives

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Klassen

2014

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Linguistic constituents that encode salient information are often prosodically reduced. Recent studies have presented evidence that higher contextual accessibility of referents results in lower prosodic prominence. Accounts of reduction in terms of accessibility set out to explain a range of phenomena that include those that are in the domain of linguistic theories of focus and givenness. The tacit assumption is that more general and independently motivated accessibility factors will be able to supplant the more specialised grammatical accounts of prosodic prominence. This paper reviews previous results and finds that existing accessibility accounts cannot explain a range of data easily captured by the alternatives theory of focus, and that various experimental studies motivating the accessibility view actually fail to distinguish between the two accounts. New experimental data are presented that tease the effects of accessibility and linguistic focus apart.