Sequential Interpretation of Pitch Prominence as Contrastive and Syntactic Information: Contrast Comes First, but Syntax Takes Over

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-478
Author(s):  
Yuki Hirose
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Branching Structures ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Prosodic Boundary

Pitch accent serves multiple duties (encoding lexical accent, syntactic structure, and focus) in spoken Japanese. This study investigates how listeners interpret a role-ambiguous pitch prominence surfacing as F0 rise, which could be a cue to the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity between two possible branching structures, or a signal of contrastive focus on the constituent accompanied by the rise. Two visual world paradigm experiments tested the same Japanese linguistic stimuli with and without pitch emphasis on the second word of structures of the following form: modifier + N1 + N2. In Experiment 1, the visual context suppressed the availability of the contrastive interpretation; in Experiment 2, the visual context made the contrastive interpretation available. We found that the same pitch event can be interpreted as both syntax-encoding and contrast-encoding information within the course of processing the same sentence, as long as contextual information is made visually available. When contrastive focus is pragmatically felicitous, it is computed immediately, as soon as the incoming input is accompanied by a notable pitch prominence (Experiment 2). The same prosodic cue can then be re-interpreted as a signal to syntax after the branching ambiguity is recognized due to subsequent input (Experiments 1 and 2). This is most consistent with the view that an initially assigned prosodic boundary is exploited for re-interpretation.

Differences in prosodic phrasing in marking syntax vs. focus: Data from Yanbian Korean

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-150
Author(s):  
Sun-Ah Jun ◽  
Xiannu Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Dual Function ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Northeastern Part ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Word Prosody ◽  
Prosodic Boundary

Abstract In studying the effect of syntax and focus on prosodic phrasing, the main issue of investigation has been to explain and predict the location of a prosodic boundary, and not much attention has been given to the nature of prosodic phrasing. In this paper, we offer evidence from intonation patterns of utterances that prosodic phrasing can be formed differently phonologically and phonetically due to its function of marking syntactic structure vs. focus (prominence) in Yanbian Korean, a lexical pitch accent dialect of Korean spoken in the northeastern part of China, just above North Korea. We show that the location of a H tone in syntax-marking Accentual Phrase (AP) is determined by the type of syntactic head, noun or verb (a VP is marked by an AP-initial H while an NP is marked by an AP-final H), while prominence-marking accentual phrasing is cued by AP-initial H. The difference in prosodic phrasing due to its dual function in Yanbian Korean is compared with that of Seoul Korean, and a prediction is made on the possibility of finding such difference in other languages based on the prosodic typology proposed in (Jun, Sun-Ah. 2014b. Prosodic typology: by prominence type, word prosody, and macro-rhythm. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.), Prosodic Typology II: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. 520–539. Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Syntactic ambiguity resolution and revision processes in complement sentences

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroki Fujita
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Garden Path ◽  
Correct Analysis ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Contradictory Evidence ◽  
Processing Heuristic

Temporarily ambiguous sentences are sometimes misanalysed and require revision during sentence processing. Previous studies have reported that non-syntactic information such as verb subcategorisation information does not always prevent misanalysis. However, there is contradictory evidence about whether non-syntactic information is immediately used to recover the globally correct analysis. Previous studies have also reported that initially assigned misinterpretations linger after disambiguation. Some recent studies have suggested that this lingering misinterpretation does not result from a failure to conduct syntactic revision. However, the current evidence for syntactic revision is scarce, limited to a syntactic structure and eye-movement while reading task, and crucially does not necessarily prove that syntactic revision is successfully conducted. The present study reports three self-paced reading experiments that investigate these issues, using temporarily ambiguous complement sentences. Experiment 1 showed that temporarily ambiguous complement sentences are misanalysed during sentence processing, which subsequently causes garden-path effects and lingering misinterpretation. Experiment 2 suggested that non-syntactic information is immediately used to recover the globally correct analysis. However, there was an indication that the incorrect analysis remains activated. Experiment 3 revealed that syntactic revision is conducted in complement sentences without regressive eye movements. The present study argues that the good-enough account can explain these results if this account assumes that a syntactic processing heuristic such as the Canonical Sentoid Strategy is used during the processing of temporarily ambiguous complement sentences.

scholarly journals A Self-Supervised Representation Learning of Sentence Structure for Authorship Attribution

2022 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Fereshteh Jafariakinabad ◽  
Kien A. Hua
Keyword(s):  
Structural Information ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Vector Representation ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Classification Tasks

The syntactic structure of sentences in a document substantially informs about its authorial writing style. Sentence representation learning has been widely explored in recent years and it has been shown that it improves the generalization of different downstream tasks across many domains. Even though utilizing probing methods in several studies suggests that these learned contextual representations implicitly encode some amount of syntax, explicit syntactic information further improves the performance of deep neural models in the domain of authorship attribution. These observations have motivated us to investigate the explicit representation learning of syntactic structure of sentences. In this article, we propose a self-supervised framework for learning structural representations of sentences. The self-supervised network contains two components; a lexical sub-network and a syntactic sub-network which take the sequence of words and their corresponding structural labels as the input, respectively. Due to the n -to-1 mapping of words to their structural labels, each word will be embedded into a vector representation which mainly carries structural information. We evaluate the learned structural representations of sentences using different probing tasks, and subsequently utilize them in the authorship attribution task. Our experimental results indicate that the structural embeddings significantly improve the classification tasks when concatenated with the existing pre-trained word embeddings.

scholarly journals Emotion-Semantic-Enhanced Bidirectional LSTM with Multi-Head Attention Mechanism for Microblog Sentiment Analysis

Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 280
Author(s):  
Shaoxiu Wang ◽  
Yonghua Zhu ◽  
Wenjing Gao ◽  
Meng Cao ◽  
Mengyao Li
Keyword(s):  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Attention Mechanism ◽  
Feature Representation ◽  
Mechanism Model ◽  
Hidden Layer ◽  
The Impact

The sentiment analysis of microblog text has always been a challenging research field due to the limited and complex contextual information. However, most of the existing sentiment analysis methods for microblogs focus on classifying the polarity of emotional keywords while ignoring the transition or progressive impact of words in different positions in the Chinese syntactic structure on global sentiment, as well as the utilization of emojis. To this end, we propose the emotion-semantic-enhanced bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network with the multi-head attention mechanism model (EBILSTM-MH) for sentiment analysis. This model uses BiLSTM to learn feature representation of input texts, given the word embedding. Subsequently, the attention mechanism is used to assign the attentive weights of each words to the sentiment analysis based on the impact of emojis. The attentive weights can be combined with the output of the hidden layer to obtain the feature representation of posts. Finally, the sentiment polarity of microblog can be obtained through the dense connection layer. The experimental results show the feasibility of our proposed model on microblog sentiment analysis when compared with other baseline models.

Situationally independent prosodic phrasing

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari R. Speer ◽  
Paul Warren ◽  
Amy J. Schafer
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
The Impact

AbstractA series of speech production and categorization experiments demonstrates that naïve speakers and listeners reliably use correspondences between prosodic phrasing and syntactic constituent structure to resolve standing and temporary ambiguity. Materials obtained from a co-operative gameboard task show that prosodic phrasing effects (e.g., the location of the strongest break in an utterance) are independent of discourse factors that might be expected to influence the impact of syntactic ambiguity, including the availability of visual referents for the meanings of ambiguous utterances and the use of utterances as instructions versus confirmations of instructions. These effects hold across two dialects of English, spoken in the American Midwest, and New Zealand. Results from PP-attachment and verb transitivity ambiguities indicate clearly that the production of prosody-syntax correspondences is not conditional upon situational disambiguation of syntactic structure, but is rather more directly tied to grammatical constraints on the production of prosodic and syntactic form. Differences between our results and those reported elsewhere are best explained in terms of differences in task demands.

Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition

2007 ◽  
pp. 634-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Trueswell ◽  
Lila R. Gleitman
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Adult Listener ◽  
Processing Abilities ◽  
Time Reading ◽  
Theory Of Language

This article describes what is known about the adult end-state, namely, that the adult listener recovers the syntactic structure of an utterance in real-time via interactive probabilistic parsing procedures. It examines evidence indicating that similar mechanisms are at work quite early during language learning, such that infants and toddlers attempt to parse the speech stream probabilistically. In the case of learning, though, the parsing is in aid of discovering relevant lower-level linguistic formatives such as syllables and words. Experimental observations about child sentence-processing abilities are still quite sparse, owing in large part to the difficulty in applying adult experimental procedures to child participants; reaction time, reading, and linguistic judgement methods have all have been attempted with children. The article discusses real-time sentence processing in adults, experimental exploration of child sentence processing, eye movements during listening and the kindergarten-path effect, verb biases in syntactic ambiguity resolution, prosody and lexical biases in child parsing, parsing development in a head-final language, and the place of comprehension in a theory of language acquisition.

Lexical government and tone group formation in Xiamen Chinese

Phonology ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo-wang Lin
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
Phonological Representation ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Syntactic Information

The study of the relation between syntactic structure and phonological representation has attracted the attention of many phonologists in the past few years. One important contribution to this field of study is Chen's (1987) work on Xiamen Chinese tone sandhi domains. He suggests that the syntax–phonology relation appeals to syntactic information such as category types and the edges of syntactic bracketings. This insight has been further elaborated in the general theory of the syntax—phonology relation of Selkirk (1986). In this theory, the relation between syntactic structure and prosodic structure above the foot and below the intonational phrase is defined in terms of the edges of syntactic constituents of designated types. More precisely, this theory incorporates two hypotheses. One is that there are designated category types in syntactic structure with respect to which one end (Right or Left) of the designated category is relevant in the formulation of a prosodic constituent C, which extends from one instance of the appropriate end (R/L) of the designated category to the next. This hypothesis has been called the End Parameter.

Phrase Lengths and the Perceived Informativeness of Prosodic Cues in Turkish

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz ◽  
Janet Dean Fodor
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
Late Closure ◽  
Prosodic Boundary ◽  
First Time ◽  
Rational Speaker

It is known from previous studies that in many cases (though not all) the prosodic properties of a spoken utterance reflect aspects of its syntactic structure, and also that in many cases (though not all) listeners can benefit from these prosodic cues. A novel contribution to this literature is the Rational Speaker Hypothesis (RSH), proposed by Clifton, Carlson and Frazier. The RSH maintains that listeners are sensitive to possible reasons for why a speaker might introduce a prosodic break: “listeners treat a prosodic boundary as more informative about the syntax when it flanks short constituents than when it flanks longer constituents,” because in the latter case the speaker might have been motivated solely by consideration of optimal phrase lengths. This would effectively reduce the cue value of an appropriately placed prosodic boundary. We present additional evidence for the RSH from Turkish, a language typologically different from English. In addition, our study shows for the first time that the RSH also applies to a prosodic break which conflicts with the syntactic structure, reducing its perceived cue strength if it might have been motivated by length considerations. In this case, the RSH effect is beneficial. Finally, the Turkish data show that prosody-based explanations for parsing preferences such as the RSH do not take the place of traditional syntax-sensitive parsing strategies such as Late Closure. The two sources of guidance co-exist; both are used when available.

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