Relative clause extraposition and prosody in German

Poschmann, Claudia; Wagner, Michael

doi:10.1007/s11049-015-9314-8

Cited by 17 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Trouvain et al (1998) provides an example of how intensity can be used as a cue for a phrase break in English. In a production study on prosodic phrasing in German, Poschmann and Wagner (2016) found that intensity is a cue to phrasing comparable in reliability to pre-boundary lengthening, such that intensity is adjusted high at the beginnings of phrases and then drops toward the end of the phrase. This was found to be a cue for phrasing distinctions even utterance-medially, so the scaling of intensity did not appear to be simply a result of the drop in sub-glottal pressure while exhaling.…”

Section: Syntactic Constituent Structure and Phrasingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Wagner

McAuliffe

2019

Journal of Phonetics

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Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of intonational tune), the syntactic constituent structure (which mainly affects prosodic phrasing), and the location of semantic focus (which mainly affects the relative prosodic prominence between words). The syntactic and semantic functional dimensions (speech act, constituency, focus) are orthogonal to each other, but to which extent their prosodic correlates are remains controversial. This paper reports on a production experiment that crosses these three dimensions to look for interactions, concentrating on interactions between focus prominence and phrasing. The results provide evidence that interactions are more limited than many current theories of sentence prosody would predict, and support a theory that keeps different prosodic dimensions representationally separate.

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Section: Syntactic Constituent Structure and Phrasingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Wagner

McAuliffe

2019

Journal of Phonetics

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“…Although the latter has been shown to be most relevant in encoding focus (see Ladd 1980;Wagner 2005;Ladd 2008; among others), absolute measures of prominence are harder to interpret. For example, a word placed earlier in a phrase will tend to have higher intensity than a word later in a phrase (Poschmann & Wagner 2016), as the latter might have lower pitch due to declination and downstep effects (cf. Ladd 2008).…”

Section: Quantitative Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The models included Focus and number of syllables (1 or 2) and their 26 Note that relative duration measures are negative because the given constituent tended to be longer in terms of number of segments than the focused one. Intensity generally decreases throughout a phrase (Poschmann & Wagner 2016), which is one reason why relative intensity measures are positive even when focus was not marked. Likewise, pitch declines throughout an utterance due to declination and downstep, which is likely one reason why relative pitch tends to be positive even in the absence of focus marking.…”

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confidence: 99%

Prosodic focus in English vs. French: A scope account

Klok

Goad

Wagner

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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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.

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“…Given that there is strong evidence that readers impose a silent prosody when reading (see Fodor, 2013 for a summary), the longer reading duration of the relative pronoun in object-modification may correspond to a break, marking the extraposition. Extraposition has been shown to be costly when not contextually expected in comprehension studies (Levy, Fedorenko, Breen, & Gibson, 2012), and has been shown to result in a greater likelihood of pauses and greater production duration of preceding material in Poschmann & Wagner (2016). Our data do not speak to whether extraposition had an effect in our data, but it may provide an overarching account of both the production and comprehension data.…”

Section: Relative Clause Position and The Information Flow Accountmentioning

confidence: 57%

Processing relative clauses across comprehension and production: similarities and differences

Santi

Grillo

Molimpakis

et al. 2018

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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We compare the processing of relative clauses in comprehension (self-paced reading) and production (planned production). We manipulated the locality of two syntactic dependencies: filler-gap (subject vs object gap) and subject-verb (center-embedded vs right-branched). The non-local filler-gap dependency resulted in a longer embedded predicate duration, across domains, consistent with memory-based accounts. For the non-local subject-verb dependency, we observe longer reading times at the main verb, but in production a greater likelihood and duration of a pause preceding the main verb. We argue that this result stems from the cost of computing the restriction, which manifests as a prosodic break. In the context of the subject-verb dependency manipulation, we also revisit the source of interpretation breakdown in multiple centerembedding. Generally, our findings imply that memory-based accounts are adequate for filler-gap, but not subject-verb, dependencies and production studies can aid in understanding complexity effects.

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Relative clause extraposition and prosody in German

Cited by 17 publications

References 63 publications

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Prosodic focus in English vs. French: A scope account

Processing relative clauses across comprehension and production: similarities and differences

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