A Gradient Harmonic Grammar Account of Nasals in Extended Phonological Words

The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on the prosodic organization of linguistic elements and the criteria used for identifying prosodic structures. Our focus is on final coronal nasals in function words in Greek and the variability in their patterns of realization before lexical words. Certain nasals coalesce before stops and delete before fricatives, whereas others do not. We propose that this split in the behavior of nasals does not pertain to item-specific prosody because the relevant strings are uniformly prosodified into an extended phonological word (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). It rather stems from the contrastive activity level of nasals in underlying forms in the spirit of Smolensky & Goldrick’s (2016) Gradient Symbolic Representations; nasals with lower activity coalesce and delete in the respective phonological environments, whereas those with higher activity do not. We show that the proposed analysis captures certain gradient effects that alternative analyses cannot account for.

Function Words at the Interface: A Two-Tier Approach

The distinction between function words and content words poses a challenge to theories of the syntax–prosody interface. On the one hand, function words are “ignored” by the mapping algorithms; that is, function words are not mapped to prosodic words. On the other hand, there are numerous accounts of function words which form prosodic words and can even be analysed as heads of larger prosodic units. Furthermore, function words seem to be a driving factor for the formation of prosodic structures in that they can largely be held accountable for the non-isomorphism between syntactic and prosodic constituency. This paper discusses these challenges with a focus on a particular function word, and the first-person nominative pronoun in Swabian, a Southern German dialect. By means of two corpus studies, it is shown that the pronoun occurs in two forms, the prosodic word [i:] and the enclitic [ə]. Depending on clause position and focus structure, the forms occur in complementary distribution. Occurrences of n-insertion allow for the establishment of a recursive prosodic word structure at the level of the phonological module. The findings support a new proposal in the form of a two-tier mapping approach to the interface between syntax and prosody.

On the Left-/Right-Branching Asymmetry in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi

In Mandarin, a left-/right-branching asymmetry is observed when the Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) process interacts with the syntactic structure of an expression: while expressions that have a left-branching syntactic structure only have a non-alternating sandhi pattern in which all but the rightmost T3 is changed to the sandhi tone, for expressions that have a right-branching syntactic structure various sandhi patterns are possible. This paper proposes that T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on a prosodic structure matched from the syntactic structure of an expression, along the lines of the Match Theory of syntactic-prosodic constituency correspondence (Selkirk 2011). The interaction of Match Phrase constraints and Strong Strong Start, which is a more restricted version of Selkirk’s (2011) Strong Start constraint, predicts that different prosodic structures are possible outputs for a right-branching expression, while for a left-branching expression the only possible output is a left-branching prosodic structure. The various possible sandhi patterns for a right-branching expression and the non-alternating sandhi pattern for a left-branching expression are derived when T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on the proposed prosodic structures.

The Multidimensional Organization of Speech

Much of our understanding of linguistic structure was necessarily first built up on the basis of isolated sentences, either constructed by analysts or speakers consulting their intuitions, or from written documents. The availability of corpora of unscripted speech is now allowing us to see what speakers actually do, opening up vast new areas for exploration. Some of the advantages described here are the access to prosody and context. The question addressed is how closely traditional syntactic structures, particularly constituent structures, are matched by prosodic structures. Points are illustrated with corpus material from Mohawk, a language indigenous to the North American Northeast.

Is “limpa” a verb or an adjective?

We investigate the role of phonological phrase boundary cues on syntactic parsing by Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP) native adults. It is assumed that speech is organized in a hierarchy of prosodic constituents that may relate to constituents of other components of grammar (Nespor e Vogel, 1986). Although this is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship, a mapping is possible between constituents of each component, such as between phonological phrases and certain syntactic unit. The production of reliable prosodic cues in spontaneous speech is controversial. For instance, Snedeker e Trueswell (2003) propose that only expert speakers produce disambiguating prosodic cues; for Kraljic e Brennan (2005), even naïve speakers produce prosodic cues that are helpful for listeners. Millotte et al. (2007) found that French native speakers produced reliable prosodic cues (phrase-final lengthening and pitch rise) when they read pairs of ambiguous sentences that differed in their prosodic structures. The authors also found that native listeners were able to use these cues to assign the ambiguous words to their correct lexical categories. Then, -boundary cues may help native listeners to correctly analyze ambiguous sentences. Motivated by the French experiment results, we proposed two experiments in order to test the influence of prosody on syntactic analysis by BP adults. In the first experiment, a sentence-reading task, participants produced different prosodic patterns for ambiguous words (verb or adjective) in different syntactic structures. Duration, pitch and energy values of the segments around the-boundaries were measured and revealed that (i)-boundaries were marked by acoustical reliable cues; and (ii) the lexical categories N, V and ADJ have different behaviors in the prosodic structure. Figure A: Example of the Noun + ambiguous word - Adj [garota MUDA] (on the left) and V [garota] [MUDA…] (on the right).In the second experiment, listeners were asked to complete the auditory ambiguous sentences that were just cut after the target words (Eu acho que a menina LIMPA… . I think the clean girl…/the girl cleans…). Participants gave more verb responses in the Verb condition and more adjective responses in the Adjective condition. These results suggest that BP adults are able to use phonological phrase boundary cues to decide if an ambiguous word is a verb or an adjective and, then, to constrain syntactic analysis. We discuss the implication of these results for models of online syntactic analysis and language acquisition.Figure B: Experiment 2- Mean number of adjective and verb responses given to adjective and verb sentences (out of 4 possible responses for each sentence type).

But Thou Shalt Go unto My Country and to My Kindred: Ambivalence about Family and Homeland in Israeli Songs about the Holocaust

The themes of “homeland” and “a place where one belongs” are integral parts of literary works about the Holocaust, as well as of popular songs about the Holocaust. In 1988, two successful albums of Israeli popular music were released: Heat of July-August, by Shlomo Artzi and Ashes and Dust, by Yehuda Poliker. Both Artzi’s song “In Germany before the War,” and the title song of the latter album, written by Yaacov Gilad and Yehuda Poliker, describe a dialogue between sons and their mothers, Holocaust survivors. In both songs, the sons, now adult Israelis born after World War II, address their mothers, who seem to live or travel through their memories from or through a foreign land. The dialogue, which may be understood as a soliloquy, expresses ambivalent memories about belonging to a family, a nation, a homeland, and the Holocaust. This paper suggests an interpretive reading of these layers of ambivalent memories as part of the construction of a uniquely Israeli-Zionist-Jewish voice of remembrance that draws on biblical references, musical and prosodic structures and references, and Israeli cultural analysis.

South West and Central Asia

This chapter covers prosodic features of languages across Southwestern, Central, and Northern Asia. One representative language from each of the four main language families is passed in review, Turkish (Turkic), Mongolian (Mongolic), Persian (Indo-European), and Georgian (Kartvelian). Owing to a lack of descriptive coverage of the prosody of languages in Central Asia, no comprehensive surveys are provided. The discussion focuses on the word and sentence prosodic structures of each of the four languages, with occasional brief excursions to related languages. The languages in this area are mainly non-tonal, while contrastive lexical stress is rare across the area, and may be controversial or marginal where it was reported earlier. Vowel harmony is pervasive in Mongolic and Turkic. In all four cases, the discussion includes the expression of focus, whether in the word order or the prosody. A final section is devoted to the intonational expression of interrogativity and related meanings.

The Role of Phrase-Level Prosody in Speech Production Planning

It has long been recognized that speakers organize the words of a spoken utterance into phrases, and accent some words and syllables rather than others. For many years these characteristics were regarded as reflections of the syntax structure of the sentence, signalled by acoustic cues to grouping and prominence, such as fundamental frequency (f0), duration, and amplitude. In the past decades, however, it has become clear that a second set of structures, parallel to but independent of the syntactic structure of a sentence, governs the context-specific surface characteristics of any particular spoken utterance of a sentence, and that the cues signalling these prosodic structures are many. These hierarchical prosodic structures are reflected in the intonation and timing contour of the utterance, and also in the surface phonetic shapes of its words. Consequently, models of speech production planning have begun to incorporate prosodic structure at the phrase level and higher as a governing framework.

Additional bi-clausal types of Japanese right-dislocations

This article reexamines the syntax of Japanese Right Dislocation Constructions (RDCs) relative to their prosodic structures and explores their clausal nature. In the literature on Japanese RDCs, two major issues have been addressed: a mono-versus a bi-clausal structure and movement versus base-generation in terms of postverbal elements along with the identification of preverbal null elements. However, the prosodic structures of the constructions remain unexplored. The present article shows that the same surface string of an RDC may possibly have different prosodic structures and bear corresponding interpretations. This remarkable fact poses a challenge to a uniform analysis of the constructions. The article argues that Japanese RDCs are divided into mono- and bi-clausal types. While defending a mono-clausal analysis with movement for some RDCs, the present article proposes additional bi-clausal analyses besides the most prevailing analysis of other RDCs. The evidence suggests that Japanese RDCs make use of different linguistic strategies.