prosodylab

paper online

A couple of weeks ago my article “Prosody and Recursion in Coordinate Structures and Beyond” was posted online by Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Here’s the abstract:

Generalizations about relative prosodic boundary strength are recursive. Initial evidence comes from the fragment of English consisting only of proper names and and and or. A systematic relation between the semantics, the syntactic combinatorics, and the prosodic phrasing of coordinate structures can be captured by recursively building up their prosody, in tandem with assembling their compositional meaning. Alternative edge-based approaches to prosodic phrasing fail to capture the recursive nature of the generalization, a result independent of whether or not prosodic representation itself is assumed to be recursive. The pattern generalizes beyond the grammar of coordination, despite two types of apparent counterexamples: Structures that are prosodically flat but syntactically articulated, and structures with an apparent outright mismatch between prosody and syntax. Closer inspection suggests that the syntax might actually be quite in tune with prosody. In both cases, natural language employs strategies to construe complex meaning with list-like structures rather than nested ones. The privileged status of lists may be due to processing factors.

Workshop on Prosodic Development

Pilar Prieto just posted the program of a workshop on prosodic development, to be held in Barcelona 16-Apr-2010 - 16-Apr-2010:

The main goal of this one-day workshop is to discuss different aspects of the children’s prosodic development in different languages. Discussions will address specific questions regarding the influence of language-specific distributional and frequency properties on language development and also the influence of general production and perception constraints. One of the goals will be to try to bridge the gap between perception and production studies in prosodic development.

Conference Website.

Mosaic 2

The call for papers for Mosaic 2 has been posted. Mosaic is a workshop bringing together semanticists active in Canada. It’s a satellite meeting of the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association.

rhyme is in the air

[see also a more recent post here. mw, august 8 2010]

Kate McCurdy and I are currently working on cross-linguistic differences in constraints on rhyme. Here’s a draft of a recent paper that proposes an explanation for why ‘identity’ rhyme is considered a satisfactory rhyme in French but not in English. We relate this difference to the way information structure affects prosody in those languages, drawing on an observation by Edwin Williams that suggests that focus- and givenness marking in English has been ‘overgeneralized’ to phonological identity in such a way that sentences can sound infelicitous just because they end with phonological identical material.

A rhyme is usually defined as a pair of words that are identical from the last accented vowel to the end of the word or line (wear/bear). Identity rhyme (or: rime très riche) is a rhyme pair in which the phonological material from the accented syllable including the onset until the end of the word or line are identical (to bear/a bear). A special case are homophones, in which the entire last words containing the last accented vowel of the line are identical. In our study we focus on rhymes that are phonologically identical but differ in meaning, because rhymes that are identical in phonology and meaning might be bad because they’re repetitious. Identity rhyme is different from mere ‘rime riche,’ in which an additional consonant is shared, but the rhymes are not fully identical (train, crane). While identity rhymes are considered poor and are rare in languages such as English or German, rime riche is quite well attested. In some other languages, French is one example, identity rhymes are ubiquitous. Of course, it could well be that this is an accidental differences stemming from the different poetic traditions in these languages, but our working hypothesis is that there is more to this.

A simple illustration of the cross-linguistic differences: One way we try to compare usage of rhyme across languages is to look translations of rhymed poetry. We have been collecting translations of the illustrated children’s book ‘Max & Moritz’ by Wilhelm Busch (first published in German in 1865).

Alternatives to Cartography

The book with papers from the 2007 conference on alternatives to cartography in Brussels (edited by Jeroen van Cranenbroeck) was just published. A pre-print of my article Focus, Topic, Word Order: A Compositional Approach is posted on the semantics archive.