The prosody of formulaic expression in the IBM/Lancaster Spoken English Corpus

Abstract

This article examines the distribution of the nucleus around selected formulaic expressions in the IBM/Lancaster Spoken English Corpus (SEC). The study reveals the presence of a positional bias such that formulaic expressions found at the end of intonation units are more likely to receive the nucleus than those found at the beginning. Amongst the formulaic expressions located at the end of intonation units, 70 percent have the nucleus assigned to the last lexical word of the expressions. For the remaining cases, the obligatory nuclei are found either on the lexical words immediately preceding the expressions or on the first words, the degree words or the flexible slots within the expressions. The study shows how prosodically annotated corpora may facilitate research on the prosody of formulaic expressions. At the same time, it also raises awareness of the issues confronting this new research avenue.

Durational Patterns of Recurrent Multiword Combinations in Mandarin Spontaneous Speech Production

“…First of all, research on multiword combinations has been mostly limited to lexical patterns. The prosodic structures of multiword combinations have only received limited attention recently (Arnon & Priva, 2013;Arnon & Snider, 2010;Lin, 2012Lin, , 2013 and research on their prosodic pattern is often limited to the readspeech or experimental setting, much rarer in the spontaneous speech context. According to Lin (2012), prosody of multiword combinations is important in at least three aspects.…”

“…First, coherent prosodic patterns in articulating formulaic chunks contribute to the accuracy of their communicated meaning (Aijmer, 1996;Ashby, 2006). Second, homogenous prosody provides empirical support for the formulaicity of multiword combinations (Altenberg & Eeg-Olofsson, 1990;Baker & McCarthy, 1988;Lin, 2013;Peters, 1983). Finally, under the framework of a prosody-driven language-learning mechanism (Lin, 2012;Peters, 1977), the phonological coherence of phraseology may increase the prominence of these chunks in production, facilitating their learning and acquisition.…”

Intonational PEriods (IPE) and Formulaic Language: A Genre-based Analysis of a French Speech Database

“…We have decided to focus on the initial structure of IPE macro-units and on the contribution of recurrent patterns of initial prosodic salience to the perception of formulaic language. Previous research has considered various candidates for specific prosodic contours (sometimes called 'melodic clichés' [9]) in the phraseology of spoken discourse [3] [16]. Our quantitative approach focuses on the recurrent prominences observable after speech breaks.…”

“…[16]. Unfortunately, large spoken corpora are rarely distributed with a fine-grained pros2odic annotation.…”

“…We aim to explore the ways in which prosodic features may correlate with extended lexical patterns, as well as the extent to which prosody corresponds to patterns which have a particular register or discourse function. Recent studies have shown that prosodic features extracted from speech databases can be successfully integrated into the investigation of phraseology [16] and its pedagogical applications [1]. Prosody is key to fluency in speech production and reception [ibid.].…”