Prosodic Effects of Discourse Salience and Association with Focus
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 onl...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
2012
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71815 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2272-8038 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0991-5541 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X |
| Summary: | 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. |
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