This paper (which went online at the journal site a year ago) has now officially appeared:
Michael Wagner (2012). A givenness illusion. Language and Cognitive Processes 27 (10). 1433–1458
*Constituents that encode information that is salient in the discourse or “given” are often prosodically reduced and remain unaccented. What is given and new is usually defined at the level of meaning: given expressions are those that refer to salient referents or predicates that have been made salient by the previous discourse. This paper presents evidence from two production studies that sometimes, a constituent that semantically should be contrastive, and hence accentable, is treated prosodically as if it was given, and placing an accent on it is consistently avoided—an illusory case of givenness. This effect can be explained by assuming that givenness is not only evaluated in terms of semantic content, but also at the phonological level. Prosodically marking a semantic contrast requires the presence of a phonological contrast. This effect thus provides evidence that the notion of “antecedent” relevant for prosodic givenness-marking needs to include reference to linguistic form, and not just to referential meaning.**
Check out our short clip from our demonstration at this year’s convocation (this is the first time we used it after our trainging session, so probably we could have gotten a better track with some more experience):
Congratulations to Elise McClay, Thea Knowles, Erin Olson, and Anna Prokofieva who just finished their B.A. at McGill!
And while we’re at it, also congratulations to four alumni’s from our labs who are now going to graduate school in various Linguistics programs: Eric Doty (now going for a Ph.D. to UPenn), Aron Hirsch (now going for a Ph.D. to MIT), Alex Piwowarek (now going for an M.A. to Saarbrücken, Germany), and Anna Prokofieva (going to do a degree in Computer Science at Columbia).
Daniel Büring will be visiting McGill Linguistics this weekend for etap and stay on for a couple of days afterwards, funded by the McGill Syntactic Interfaces Research Group. Here’s the ABC of his visit:
A. Invited Talk at ETAP2:
Saturday, September 24
9:00-9:30am New Residence, Ballroom B (directions)
Daniel Büring: Correspondence at the Syntax–Phonology Interface
(joint work with Hubert Truckenbrodt, ZAS, Berlin)
*Abstract: In this paper we analyze the syntax-to-prosody mapping in German and English using Correspondence Theory. Our proposal develops the original ideas of containment based mapping theories like Truckenbrodt’s (1995) StressXP/WrapXP and is offshoots such as Selkirk’s (2009) recent Match theory, but tackles a number of notorious problems for these, in particular the interaction of stress assignment and movement, as well as directional asymmetries with predicate integration as well as focus. We argue that the correspondence theoretic format offers distinctive advantages in these realms.**
Shifting prominence to mark focus requires a linguistic antecedent, so if you say ‘A red apple’, chances are you or someone either said something like ‘ green apple’, or there is some other reason why antecedents of this sort are salient, for example, someone might have asked: What kind of apple do you want?
Marking focus is a bit like using pronouns and other anaphoras: While there must be a proper antecedent to resolve the reference to interpret anaphoras, for focus there must be a proper antecedent to justify the contrast. Pronouns can also be used cataphorically, where the antecedent for the reference comes after the pronoun–and the same is true for focus marking.
Here’s a nice exploitation of our grammatical knowledge that focus marking requires a linguistic antecedent from September 15’s Colbert report:
Colbert is using focus cataphorically to set up an expectation for an antecedent, and then leaves us hanging in mid air. There are a number of papers at the upcoming etap conference that address focus marking and its use in context.
The second conference on experimental and theoretical advances in prosody is just around the corner. It will take place at the New Residence at McGill from Fri 23-Sun 25. If you plan to attend, please register at the conference website.
if you’d like to get a digest emails with posts to this blog, you can subscribe to it here (or use the link in the sidebar). This is a low traffic blog with prosody-related posts. Some of the information posted here is about local events, and I haven’t figured out how to allow readers who don’t live in Montréal to filter these out of the digest emails, so if you subscribe to the email you might get some of these.
The Prosodylab-Aligner is a set of Python and shell scripts for performing automated alignment of text to audio of speech using Hidden Markov Models developed in our lab by Kyle Gorman. It is designed to be easy to use as possible, and with laboratory data in mind. While it ships with pre-trained North American English phoneme models based on data collected in our lab, it also supports training on arbitrary data.
