Prosodic Effects of Discourse Salience and Association with Focus
Author(s)
Wagner, M.; Breen, Mara; Flemming, Edward; Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie; Gibson, Edward A.
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Three factors that have been argued to influence the prosody of an utterance are (i) which constituents encode discourse-salient information; (ii) which constituents are contrastive in that they evoke alternatives; and (iii) which constituents interact with the meaning of focus operators such as only (i.e., they ‘associate’ with focus). One challenge for a better understanding of these factors and their interaction has been the difficulty of finding a way to evaluate hypotheses quantitatively, since individual variation in productions is often large enough to wash out experimental effects. In this paper, we apply a methodology introduced in [1] to control for such variation and present evidence for how the three factors interact to influence prosody in sentences containing single or multiple foci.
Date issued
2010-05Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and PhilosophyJournal
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2010
Publisher
International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
Citation
Wagner, M. et al. "Prosodic Effects of Discourse Salience and Association with Focus." Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2010, Chicago, May 11-14, 2010.
Version: Author's final manuscript