Samek-Lodovici (2005) contributes to a well-established tradition of work on the prosody-focus interface, which proposes that, cross-linguistically, there is a correlation between culminative ...prosodic prominence and focus. Chichewa focus prosody is problematic for the Stress-Focus correlation, because words with in-situ focus do not bear sentential stress, according to Kanerva's (1990) description. To account for Chichewa, Samek-Lodovici proposes that, in essence, Chichewa does not have culminative focus prosody because it does not have culminative sentential prosody. Kanerva (1990: 139-140) suggests that Chichewa does, though, have sentence-level stress: the penult of the final word of the Intonation Phrase (IP) is described as having 'considerable lengthening' making it 'noticeably longer' than any IP-internal stressed syllable whether focused or not. However, he does not provide phonetic figures to support this description. Surprisingly, no thorough follow-up phonetic study of Chichewa has systematically investigated this issue. In this paper we present the results of an experiment conducted in Malawi involving several non-linguist native speakers of Chichewa, which set out to test Kanerva's (1990) and Samek-Lodovici's (2005) conflicting claims about the relative length of penult vowels in focused vs. IP-final position. We show that Kanerva's claim is correct: the penult vowel of an IP is significantly longer than other penult vowels in the IP, including those of words in focus. However, our study contradicts Kanerva (1990), as we find that focused constituents do not attract even phrasal stress. We suggest that the focus prosody reported is actually emphasis prosody, and that there is no obligatory focus prosody in Chichewa.
Besedilna fonetika je področje, ki je v slovenističnem jezikoslovju razmeroma slabo raziskano. V prispevku je predstavljen primer besedilnofonetičnega raziskovanja, tj. analiza poudarkov z vidika ...besednovrstne predvidljivosti, pri čemer je izpostavljena pomembnost posameznih raziskovalnih faz, kot so izbor govorcev, priprava, transkripcija in segmentacija gradiva ter dvostopenjsko potrjevanje raziskovalnih hipotez - slušna in računalniška analiza. Raziskava temelji na korpusu izbranih slovenskih pogovornih TV-oddaj, torej na avtentičnem in bolj ali manj spontanem medijskem govoru.
Breathing, Parsing, Praying Moe, Peter Wayne
Soundings (Nashville, Tenn.),
05/2017, Letnik:
100, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Editor's Note: This fragmented essay is a collage. It grows out of the commonplace book, a practice dating back to ancient Greece and Rome wherein a writer gathers passages, copying them down by ...hand, passages that she then responds to, ruminates on, returns to again and again, passages that prompt thinking, passages that are internalized, passages whose syntax becomes the writer's own. "Breathing, Parsing, Praying" is to be read within that tradition. The essay draws upon my own commonplace book to think through the relationship between language, the body, and prayer, the keeping of a commonplace book making possible interdisciplinary ways of reading, writing, thinking, and being.
This paper reports on a study of Polish stress, the only uncontested example of a bidirectional system with internal lapses (Kager 2001, McCarthy 2003). The results indicate that Polish stress is ...non-iterative, a finding that seriously calls into question the existence of this particular stress type. An analysis of the acoustic prominence of syllables traditionally associated with different stress levels suggests that Polish simple words exhibit only one (penultimate) prominence. The stress pattern in compounds is less uniform; they can carry one or two (penultimate) stresses, depending on their prosodic structure. I analyse the distribution of stresses in compounds as governed by clash avoidance. Specifically, compound stems are parsed into separate PWds and assigned separate stresses only if the emergent trochees are non-adjacent. Hence, four-syllable compounds like /tsuʤɔ-ˈʑεmʲεts/ ‘foreigner’ have one stress, while compounds like /banaˈnɔvɔ-arbuˈzɔvɨ/ ‘banana-watermelon’ have two. I ascribe this pattern to the undominated ranking of the *FtFt constraint.
Constraints on prosodic and syntactic well-formedness conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of new information focus, where the best prosodic position for main ...stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the constituent being focused. Since focus must be stressed, either stress or the focused constituent must abandon their best position, violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for it. This paper argues for an optimality theoretic analysis of this conflict, showing how different focus paradigms reflect different rankings of the relevant syntactic and prosodic constraints. As we will see, only an optimality analysis can account for the paradigm of Italian focus while maintaining the kind of prosodic theory of main stress emerged from prosodic studies in the last two decades. Furthermore, the analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa with no need for language-specific parametric devices. The conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints determines a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints with interface conditions kept to an absolute minimum.
This study assessed perception of suprasegmental features of speech by 30 prelingual children with sensorineural hearing loss. Ten children had cochlear implants (CIs), and 20 children wore hearing ...aids (HA): 10 with severe hearing loss and 10 with profound hearing loss. Perception of intonation, syllable stress, word emphasis, and word pattern was assessed. Results revealed that the two HA groups significantly outperformed the CI group in perceiving both intonation and stress. Within each group, word pattern was perceived best, and then intonation and emphasis, with syllable stress perceived poorest. No significant correlation emerged between age at implantation and perception of the various suprasegmental features, possibly due to participants' relatively late age at implantation. Results indicated that CI use did not show an advantage over HA use in the perception of suprasegmental features of speech. Future research should continue to explore variables that might improve this perception.
This paper describes the first laboratory study of an idiosyncratic linguistic form that represents a crucial point of contact between speech and song: what is referred to here as thestylized ...interjection. The stylized interjection, as described throughout the musicological and linguistic literature, is associated with a particular intonational formula—thecalling contour—and intriguingly, with a purportedly cross-cultural musical fingerprint: the interval of the minor third. A reading task was used to systematically compare the stylized interjection to four other linguistic forms, and to comparespokentocalledproduction. Analysis of several acoustic variables (involving pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre) demonstrates many significant effects of sentence-type and production, which together establish the characteristics of the English stylized interjection and suggest its interpretation assung speech. The unique sound-meaning correspondence of the stylized interjection is thereby elucidated. Implications for music-language studies (especially vis-a-vis the minor third) are also discussed.
Under the weak layering approach to prosodic structure (Itô & Mester 1992), the requirement that output forms be exhaustively parsed into binary feet, even when the input contains an odd-number of ...syllables, results in the odd-parity input problem, which consists of two sub-problems. The odd heavy problem is a pathological type of quantity-sensitivity where a single odd-numbered heavy syllable in an odd-parity output is parsed as a monosyllabic foot. The even output problem is the systematic conversion of odd-parity inputs to even-parity outputs. The article examines the typology of binary stress patterns predicted by two approaches, symmetrical alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993) and iterative foot optimisation (Pruitt 2008, 2010), to demonstrate that the odd-parity input problem is pervasive in weak layering accounts. It then demonstrates that the odd-parity input problem can be avoided altogether under the alternative structural assumptions of weak bracketing (Hyde 2002).
Three arguments are advanced to support a claim that the focus feature in Russian is licensed in clause-final position; that contrastive focus, as opposed to new information focus, has an additional ...contrast feature that licenses movement to the left periphery; & that the launching site of such movement is the clause-final position determined by focus. (1) Unlike English, Russian does not tolerate more than one contrastive focus per clause, except in cases of counterassertive polar focus corresponding to inserted in English. (2) Russian quantifiers in both new information focus & contrastive focus take scope under other quantifiers, an expected result if A-bar movement obligatorily reconstructs for scope & contrastive focus is base-generated in the same position as new information focus. (3) Remnants of extraction of contrastive focus from a larger constituent in Russian are always stranded at the extraction site, ie, clause-final position. The Russian evidence challenges explanations of focus-related word order in terms of stress, particularly the nuclear stress rule. J. Hitchcock
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