Browsing by Subject "Focus"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

An experimental approach to the production and perception of Norwegian tonal accent
(2015-05) Kelly, Niamh Eileen; Smiljanic, Rajka, 1967-; Myers, Scott; Crowhurst, Megan; Sussman, Harvey; Kristoffersen, Gjert
This dissertation examines the lexical tonal accent contrast of the Trondersk dialect of East Norwegian from the perspective of both production and perception. The goal of the production study was to conduct an in-depth investigation of the tonal accent realization in this understudied dialect, as well as to examine how the lexical accents are impacted by pragmatic focus and sentential intonation. The Trondersk dialect is unusual typologically in that it exhibits a tonal contrast on monosyllabic words. Therefore, the current study examines the contrast on disyllabic and monosyllabic words. Ten speakers were recorded reading target monosyllabic and disyllabic words representing each accent, in noncontrastive and contrastive focus, and also at the right edge of an accent phrase (AP). The goal of the perception study was to determine what cues listeners use to identify the accents. The results of the acoustic analysis revealed that the main correlate of the disyllabic accent distinction in this dialect was in the timing of the F₀ contour, with accent 2 having a later alignment of F₀ landmarks and a higher F₀ minimum than accent 1. In contrastive focus, the accent contrast was found to be enhanced. Accent 1 showed an expanded pitch range and accent 2 an even later alignment of the HL contour compared to noncontrastive focus. When produced at the end of an AP, both accents had a higher F₀ minimum and lower AP boundary tone compared to AP-medial position. The AP-final position also had an influence on segment duration, such that the stressed vowels were shorter and final vowels were longer compared to the AP-medial position. The results of the production experiments thus revealed that contrastive focus and AP-final position both affected pitch cues even though these cues are primarily used to distinguish the lexical pitch contrasts. However, the variation in pitch contour introduced by these factors did not diminish the lexical contrast. In fact, the asymmetrical impact of focus on accent 1 and accent 2 words enhanced the distinction between the two accents. For the monosyllabic contrast, the results revealed that in a noncontrastive focus realization, words with the circumflex accent have a wider HL contour compared to the unmarked accent. In contrastive focus, both accents have a wider pitch range and later low tone alignment. Unlike the effect of contrastive focus on disyllabic words where this increased the timing difference between the accents, the timing of the monosyllabic accents changed in the same direction in contrastive focus. Phonologically long vowels were also lengthened in this condition. Based on the production results, a categorization of stimuli with manipulated pitch contours was conducted. This experiment tested which acoustic cues (height and alignment of F₀ minimum, and alignment of F₀ maximum and turning point from maximum to minimum) are necessary for the perception of the tonal contrast. The results are consistent with the production findings in that changes in all of the examined acoustic cues contributed to the shift in accent categorization. The later timing of the main F₀ landmarks (F₀ maximum, F₀ minimum and turning point from maximum to minimum) induced accent 2 identification. Raising F₀ minimum height also led to more accent 2 responses. The analysis of the perception patterns furthermore revealed that the effect of a later timing of F₀ minimum was weak unless combined with a later timing of the other F₀ landmarks, or a higher F₀ minimum level, all of which contributed to more accent 2 responses. These results indicate that accent 1 is characterized by an early fall, and accent 2 by a salient initial high tone. This comprehensive investigation provided an in-depth description of the monosyllabic and disyllabic accents in this understudied, more conservative dialect that is being replaced by less conservative urban varieties. This contributes to the literature on Scandinavian accentology. Furthermore, this study adds to the literature on the realization of focus in tonal accent languages, and how prosodically marked focus and sentence intonation interact with lexical accents. Finally, this work provides insights into how production and perception constraints shape processing of pitch variation.
Focus and movement in a variety of K'ichee'
(2014-12) Velleman, Leah Bridges; England, Nora C.
This dissertation describes two related phenomena in the syntax and semantics of K’ichee’ (Mayan), concentrating on the variety spoken in and around Nahualá. The first phenomenon is focus, the special discourse status granted to constituents which provide new and important information. The second phenomenon is syntactic movement, which occurs in several different constructions in K’ichee’ — most relevantly, that of focus movement. Across languages, focused constituents are highlighted in one way or another; and in Mayan languages, this highlighting often takes the form of movement to a position immediately before the verb. But I show that the relationship between focus and movement in K’ichee’ is less straightforward than has previously been assumed. In particular, it is often possible for a focused constituent to remain in situ. Having shown that focus in situ is possible, I turn to the question of when it occurs. I show that focus in situ follows an ergative/absolutive pattern: it is impossible for transitive subjects, but possible for all other constituent types. This pattern is compared to ergative/absolutive patterns found elsewhere in K’ichee’ grammar, and in other languages.
The French c'est-cleft : empirical studies of its meaning and use
(2013-05) Destruel, Emilie; Beaver, David I., 1966-
This dissertation contributes to a fuller description of the French c'est-cleft by reporting on three empirical studies on its meaning and use, and presenting a unified account of the cleft couched in Stochastic Optimality Theory. The first two studies in this dissertation explore the meaning of the cleft, more specifically the exhaustive meaning. First, the results from a forced-choice task, designed to test the level of exhaustivity of the cleft compared to exclusive sentences and canonical sentences, show that the cleft does not behave like the other two sentence forms. This is taken to indicate that the exhaustivity associated with the cleft is not truth-conditional. Instead, I argue that exhaustivity arises from a pragmatic constraint on the way speakers use language. This argument is supported further in the second study, a corpus study that shows there is no categorical ban on the type of NP that can occur in post-copular position in a cleft. In fact, the cleft interacts felicitously with a number of expressions such as universal quantifiers and additives, which have been claimed to never appear in post-copular position. This corpus study further shows that the primary aspect of the cleft is not to convey exhaustivity, but instead to convey contrast or correction. Finally, the third study, a semi-spontaneous production experiment, helps make precise the situations in which an element is clefted. The results demonstrate that there is a clear asymmetry between the way grammatical subjects or non-subjects are marked: focused subjects are mostly clefted whereas focused non-subjects generally remain in situ. Moreover, the experiment shows that there exists some amount of free variation: subjects can be realized via prosody and non-subjects can be clefted. I conclude my research by proposing that the non-random alternation cleft/canonical is not a categorical phenomenon, but is gradient and explained by a set of constraints on French' syntax, prosody and pragmatics. The cleft is used to provide contrast or a total answer to the question under discussion.
A grammatical approach to topic and focus : a syntactic analysis with preliminary evidence from language acquisition
(2011-08) Lyu, Hee Young; Meier, Richard P.; Green, Lisa J.; Wechsler, Stephen M.; Beavers, John T.; Asher, Nicholas M.
The goal of this dissertation is to argue on the basis of the minimalist framework that the topichood of sentence topics and contrastive focus result from derivational and structural differences in the left periphery and to provide acquisition data from child language to support this claim, showing data from Korean, a free word-order and pro-drop language in which topics and contrastive foci are realized morphologically. In Korean, topic phrases merge in the left periphery and contrastive focus phrases undergo scrambling, one of the shared properties of free word-order languages. It is consistent in fixed word-order languages such as Italian and Hungarian and a free word-order language like Korean that topics merge and contrastive foci move to the left. Topics precede contrastive foci: topics merge in TopP, a higher functional projection than FocP, to which focus phrases move. In the process of language acquisition, the derivational and structural differences between topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases may have influences on the developmental order of grammar acquisition. In acquisition data from two-year-old Korean children, topics emerge earlier than contrastive foci, indicating that topic and contrastive focus are also acquisitionally different. This study is the first attempt to examine the structural differences and the influence on language acquisition of morphologically derived topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases in acquisition data from a free word-order and pro-drop language. This study shows the structural consistency of topic and contrastive focus between a free word-order language and fixed word-order languages. The syntactic and acquisitional distinction of topic merge and contrastive focus movement is compatible with the semantic and pragmatic approaches to topic and focus. This study provides evidence of the syntactic differences between topic and contrastive focus without dependence on phonetic features; therefore, this study is a base for drawing a map of the left periphery of human languages.
The genius of Mocho’ (Mayan) : morphosyntactic alignment and its interaction with grammatical aspect and information structure
(2021-09-27) Pérez González, Jaime; England, Nora C.; Zavala Maldonado, Roberto; Law, Danny A.; Beavers, John T.
This dissertation offers a refined account of person marking in Mocho’, a highly endangered Mayan language spoken by around 50 people in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. In previous research, Mocho’ has been described as having two sets of person markings (Set A and B), but here, as one of the main contributions of this research, I show evidences of a third set (Set C). This new finding offers a whole new analysis of the grammar of this language. Thus, this dissertation exhibits the interaction of these three sets of person markings with grammatical aspect, voice, and information structure. To disentangle these person markings, I offer a detailed description of the grammatical aspect, and as a result, aside of the evidence to demonstrate the existence of Set C, I propose an alternative analysis where Mocho’ exhibits a split aspectual system based on the type of verbal predicate that heads the clause: direct vs “reverse”. To this fact, I also propose that Mocho’ has two types of transitive verbs: direct vs “reverse”, and that they are used complementarily depending on two main constraints that target the A [familiar, animate]. This leads us to propose the existence of four different types of voice in Mocho’: passive vs antipassive, direct vs “reverse” voice. To conclude, I offer a whole picture of the reanalysis of the morphosyntactic alignment of these person markings in these two transitive constructions. I exhibit a tripartite alignment motivated by aspect, an active-stative alignment depending on verbal vs non-verbal predicates, and split ergative “reverse” marking where SAPs align ergative alignment and third person becomes neutral. To comprehend this interaction, it is crucial to look at the naturalistic use of the language to capture the nature of the information flow. Therefore, another contribution of this research is the description of the information structure that Mocho’ utilizes to convey certain types of information (focus, contrastive-focus, and topic).
Two types of focus in Castilian Spanish
(2012-08) Chung, Hye-Yoon; Nishida, Chiyo; Hensey, Frederick; Kelm, Orlando; Salaberry, Rafael; Beaver, David
This dissertation proposes an experimental study of focus in Spanish, investigating, in particular, if two types of focus – Contrastive focus and Non-contrastive focus – are syntactically and prosodically distinguished. The evidence that the conceptual distinction between the focus subtypes can be represented linguistically has been found in languages (Drubig 2003, É. Kiss 1998, Gundel & Fretheim 2001, Zubizarreta 1998 to name a few). As for Spanish, Zubizarreta (1998) argued that the two types of focus most noticeably differ syntactically. While Non-contrastive Focus should appear at utterance-final position, Contrastive Focus may appear in-situ. Nevertheless, not all the studies seem to accept Zubizarreta’s (1998) syntax-oriented distinction between the two focus types. A few studies suggest that not only Contrastive Focus but also Non-Contrastive Focus can indeed occur sentence-internally (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Kim & Avelino 2003, Toledo 1989). Inspired by a handful of studies and motivated by empirical data gathered for the pilot study, the current study sets out to investigate Zubizarreta’s (1998) syntax-oriented claim on the distinction between the focus subtypes. Focus in Spanish is known to be prosodically marked by its particular intonational contour- higher pitch and the early peak, and secondarily longer duration and/or higher intensity, compared to unfocused elements in a given utterance (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Domínguez 2004a & b, Face 2000, 2001, 2002b, Hualde 2003, 2005, Kim & Avelino 2003, de la Mota 1995, 1997, Navarro Tomás 1918, Nibert 2000, Quilis 1971, Sosa 1998, Toledo 1989, Zubizarreta 1998). We assume that the distinction between the two types of focus would also be made using the existing cues, as suggested by a handful of studies on focus types (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Kim & Avelino 2003, Zubizarreta, 1998). The findings of our experiments clearly indicate that Spanish speakers consistently use different phonetic and phonological cues such as duration and pitch in order to make a distinction between the two types of focus. These findings give clear evidence that the pragmatically defined notion of focus (Lambrecht 1994) is indeed further divided into two types in Castilian Spanish, somewhat similar to the distinction made in English (Selkirk 1984, 1995).