Topic in dialogue: prosodic and syntactic features

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between phonetic phrasing, tonal pattern and phrase structure in left peripherical sentence topic. Our corpus consists of three task-oriented Italian dialogues. The results of prosodic analysis show that topics are usually associated to the highest pitch values in the Tone Unit, regardless to their actual syntactic position. Syntactic analysis shows that, while topic phrase structure is rather variable, topic function is quite stable, i.e., topics have mostly circumstantial-locative function, and less frequently subject function. Finally, phonetic phrasing, prominence placement and phrase structure shows clearly regular relationships.

Sentence topics in Italian: An analysis on the CHROME Corpus

“…Starting from the syntactic features, in most cases the topic is constituted by Noun Phrases performing the function of subject and with light weight, in line with previous studies (Crocco & Savy, 2007;Voghera & Turco, 2008), even if both phrase structure and weight are quite variable (Table 3). Among the syntactic features considered, Weight appears to have the most effect on the phonetic realization of topical expressions.…”

“…As for syntactic Weight, Voghera & Turco (2008) provide a scale for verbal phrases and for nominal phrases (Noun, Predicative Noun and Prepositional Phrases). We refer to the nominal scale since Crocco & Savy (2007) found that topics are mostly realized as Noun, Prepositional and Adverbial Phrases. The scale takes into account both phrases' structure and expansion and considers five levels of weight according to the presence/absence of determiners (det) and modifiers (mod) and whether the head is a noun or a pronoun (pro):…”

“…We adapted the scale observing not only the presence/absence of modifiers, but also the type of modifier (adjective, Prepositional Phrase, relative clause). On the other hand, as proposed by Crocco & Savy (2007), we did not consider determiners. Accordingly, we established four levels of weight, measured as a function of the presence and type of modifiers, classifying Light (L), Medium (M), Heavy (H) and very Heavy (H+) phrases (Table 1).…”

“…As far as we know, analyses involving all these factors have not been carried out systematically. Moreover, although most of the studies refer to declarative utterances, in some cases the modality is not considered, since topics are examined in both declarative and interrogative utterances (Giordano & Crocco, 2005;Crocco & Savy, 2007). Whereas, it has been widely observed that a sharp contrast exists between hanging topic left-dislocations in interrogatives and declaratives: only the former are obligatorily realized with a pause and may have a low edge tone (for example, for Spanish, Feldhausen, 2016).…”

“…As for left peripherical topic structures, Crocco & Savy (2007) in their syntax-prosody interface analysis, find that the great majority of topics are realized as Noun Phrases, followed by a small but substantial number of Prepositional Phrases, and rare cases of Adverbial Phrases. Among the structural features, they also consider the syntactic "weight" of topical constituents (Voghera & Turco, 2008) which they find to correlate with the prosodic pattern of topics, i.e., the syntactic and the prosodic head of the topical constituents coincide in light structures, but they do not in heavy ones (see §3.2).…”