scholarly journals The pragmalinguistic character of intonation units in discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 2081-2095
Author(s):  
Bazarbayeva Z.M. ◽  
Amanbayeva A. Zh ◽  
Zhumabayeva Zh. T ◽  
Zhalalova A. M
Keyword(s):  
Intonation Units

Lexical Arguments and Information Types in Malay Oral Narratives

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-97
Author(s):  
Siaw-Fong Chung
Keyword(s):  
Information Flow ◽  
The Other ◽  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Information ◽  
Intonation Units ◽  
Locative Expressions ◽  
Transitive Verbs

The analysis in this paper was based on five Malay narratives of the “frog story”. In these narratives, the types of lexical arguments and their relations with information flow and topic continuity were analyzed. It was found that most narrators used one lexical argument in telling the frog story (e.g., sarang itu jatuh “the nest fell”). About 60% of the verbs in the narratives contained one lexical argument only. Some transitive verbs that usually require the presence of both lexical arguments were used with one lexical argument only when produced in speech (e.g., dia mencari ø di merata tempat “he searched (for) ø everywhere”). Objects were sometimes omitted, as their meanings could be predicted from previous context. Despite the omission of objects, transitive constructions still prevailed in the stories. The most frequently occurring lexical arguments were objects (O) (37%), followed by intransitive subjects (S) (29%) and transitive subjects (A) (27%). In addition, our results showed that new information in Malay was usually allocated to the core argument of the object and to locative expressions, indicating that most of the new information appeared at the end of a clause. On the other hand, topic continuity was held between the subjects in two continuous intonation units. This clear-cut division of discourse functions in the heads and tails of constructions was consistently found in the five pieces of narration. This observation not only showed how ideas could be continued in Malay oral narratives, but also contributes to the study of discourse structure in Malay.

Usage-based linguistics and the magic number four

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarence Green
Keyword(s):  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Magic Number ◽  
Cognitive Domain ◽  
Psychological Review ◽  
Magical Number ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Intonation Units ◽  
Processing Information ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Linguistic Structures

AbstractMiller’s (1956, The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2). 81–97) working memory (WM) capacity of around seven items, plus or minus two, was never found by usage-based linguists to be a recurrent pattern in language. Thus, it has not figured prominently in cognitive models of grammar. Upon reflection, this is somewhat unusual, since WM has been considered a fundamental cognitive domain for information processing in psychology, so one might have reasonably expected properties such as capacity constraints to be reflected in language use and structures derived from use. This paper proposes that Miller’s (1956) number has not been particularly productive in usage-based linguistics because it turns out to have been an overestimate. A revised WM capacity has now superseded it within cognitive science, a “magic number four plus or minus one” (Cowan 2001, The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(1). 87–185). This paper suggests, drawing on evidence from spoken language corpora and multiple languages, that a range of linguistic structures and patterns align with this revised capacity estimate, unlike Miller’s (1956), ranging from phrasal verbs, idioms, n-grams, the lengths of intonation units and some abstract grammatical properties of phrasal categories and clause structure.

scholarly journals Sequences of Intonation Units form a ~ 1 Hz rhythm

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Inbar ◽  
Eitan Grossman ◽  
Ayelet N. Landau
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Neural System ◽  
Specific Pattern ◽  
Physiological Data ◽  
Low Frequencies ◽  
Speech Stimuli ◽  
Intonation Units ◽  
Speech Envelope

Abstract Studies of speech processing investigate the relationship between temporal structure in speech stimuli and neural activity. Despite clear evidence that the brain tracks speech at low frequencies (~ 1 Hz), it is not well understood what linguistic information gives rise to this rhythm. In this study, we harness linguistic theory to draw attention to Intonation Units (IUs), a fundamental prosodic unit of human language, and characterize their temporal structure as captured in the speech envelope, an acoustic representation relevant to the neural processing of speech. IUs are defined by a specific pattern of syllable delivery, together with resets in pitch and articulatory force. Linguistic studies of spontaneous speech indicate that this prosodic segmentation paces new information in language use across diverse languages. Therefore, IUs provide a universal structural cue for the cognitive dynamics of speech production and comprehension. We study the relation between IUs and periodicities in the speech envelope, applying methods from investigations of neural synchronization. Our sample includes recordings from every-day speech contexts of over 100 speakers and six languages. We find that sequences of IUs form a consistent low-frequency rhythm and constitute a significant periodic cue within the speech envelope. Our findings allow to predict that IUs are utilized by the neural system when tracking speech. The methods we introduce here facilitate testing this prediction in the future (i.e., with physiological data).

Intonation unit boundaries and the storage of bigrams

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wahl
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Effects ◽  
Psychological Status ◽  
Statistical Association ◽  
High Association ◽  
Intonation Units ◽  
Language And Cognition ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Storage ◽  
Statistical Metrics ◽  
Intonation Unit

Much recent work on language and cognition has examined the psychological status of collocations/formulas/multi-word expressions as mentally stored units. These studies have used a variety of statistical metrics to quantify the degree of strength or association of these sequences, and then they have correlated these strengths with particular behavioral effects that evidence mental storage. However, the relationship between intonational prosody and storage of collocations has received little attention. Through a corpus-based approach, this study examines the hypothesis that boundaries between successive intonation units avoid splitting word bigrams that exhibit high statistical association, with such high association taken to be an index of mental storage of these bigrams. Conversely, bigrams exhibiting lower statistical association ought to be more likely to be split by intonation unit boundaries under this hypothesis.

The syntax of intonation units in Sasak

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fay Wouk
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Intonation Units

In this paper I examine the syntactic nature of intonation units in Sasak, and compare the distribution of syntactic types with previously published work on other languages, in particular Mandarin, and to a lesser extent, Japanese. Sasak and Mandarin prove to have very similar frequencies of clausal IUs, but Sasak has far more complete clauses than Mandarin, which prefers elliptical clauses. Nominal IUs in the Sasak data are far more likely to be independent than in Japanese or Mandarin conversational data, and fulfill very different functions than those found in studies of Mandarin. I argue that cross-linguistic differences in the relative frequencies of different types of syntactic constituents are best explained partly in terms of the syntactic resources available in a given language, and partly in terms of cultural variation in conversational practice. Differences in the relative frequencies of various functions of nominal IUs, however, may relate more to genre than to language, but the limited corpora used in studies to date make this difficult to determine.

Acts and the relationship between discourse and grammar

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Hannay ◽  
Caroline Kroon
Keyword(s):  
Considerable Extent ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Intonation Units ◽  
The Status ◽  
Discourse Grammar ◽  
Discourse Organization ◽  
The Relationship

In modelling the discourse–grammar interface, a central question concerns the status of discourse act as the minimal unit of discourse organization and its relation to units of grammatical structure. This paper seeks to clarify the notion of act by defining it as a strategic rather than a conceptual unit, and by setting out a classification of strategic acts. Illustration is then offered for the position that discourse acts are to a very considerable extent realized in English by intonation units and punctuation units. This is done by considering how punctuational variation and cases of intonation/syntax mismatch can be explained in terms of the specific discourse contribution of the units concerned. Although the correlation between discourse acts and intonation/punctuation units remains problematic, in that there may not be a 1 : 1 correspondence, it is still attractive — at least for English — to see the linguistic correlate of acts in intonation and punctuation units rather than in syntactic structures. The paper finishes by considering the implications for the formalizing of relations between discourse, semantics and syntax in Functional Discourse Grammar.

scholarly journals Formal intonative analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Leticia Corrêa Celeste ◽  
Cassius Reis
Keyword(s):  
Sharp Increase ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Automatic Analysis ◽  
Target Point ◽  
British English ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
Explanatory Analysis ◽  
Intonation Units ◽  
Variation Trends

There is a general consensus among scholars that one same sentence can be said in different ways. This consensus, however, falls apart when the issues are discussed related to the efficiency of prosody in allowing us to say the very same sequence of segments with different meanings. According to Hirst (1987) e t’Hartet. al. (1990) the difficulties of transcribing prosody overcome the difficulties of transcribing the segmental. They argue that in order to investigate how the melody contributes to the overall understanding of an enunciation a metalanguage was required through which the phenomenon can be discussed. The vocabulary of this metalanguage must consist of appropriate descriptive units through which it is possible to speak of entities and structures at various levels of observation. The semi-automatic analysis, by means of the programs MOMEL and INTSINT, was used in the description of some intonational languages such as: French (di Cristo, 2011), British English (Auran, Bouzon and Hirst, 2004; Brierley, 2011) and analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese rhythm by means of manual INTSINT (Gonçalves, 2000). The present study aims to determine if the program of semi-automatic intonational analysis - INTSINT - is capable of reproduce melodic variation trends of the Brazilian Portuguese. In our proposal, the effectiveness of the program to differentiate between declarative and interrogative forms during reading was evaluated. The following hypotheses were raised: (I) the analysis of intonation with the program INTSINT allows the choice of different phonological theories regarding the use of entonative units;(II) it is possible to distinguish between declarative and interrogative forms by means of coded target points to Brazilian Portuguese. An explanatory analysis of the codification performed by MOMELINTSINT was performed. The corpus of this study consists of 10 short texts, with approximately five sentences that were read by 10 people of the female sex, aged 20-30 years. The acoustic analysis of the data was performed using the program Praatversion 4.4.27, available at www.praat.org (Weenink and Boersma, 1997 ,i contains the necessary extensions for the implementation of the programs MOMEL / INTSINT. These last ones are freely available on the site http://aune.lpl.univaix.fr/~auran/english/ressources.html. The high beginning was common for the declarative and interrogative modalities. This fact was represented by the first target point, coded as T, or the second target point, coded as M; but followed by H, T or U. Nevertheless, they differ at the end of the unit: in interrogative sentences, a sharp increase represented by the symbols T and H can be observed just before the final fall. In declarative sentences it is possible to perceive a rise is followed by a downfall, but not as much and not as systematically as in the interrogative sentences. Far from closing the discussion on intonation units and in the chosen modalities for this study,our initial goal of evaluating the behavior of the program INTSINT against pitch variations was reached. We conclude that the program INTSINT is able to transmit trends and also the general melodic pattern of F0 curve.

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