scholarly journals Adaptação acústico-prosódica local em Português Europeu

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Vera Cabarrão ◽  
Fernando Batista ◽  
Helena Moniz ◽  
Isabel Trancoso ◽  
Ana Isabel Mata
Keyword(s):  
Voice Quality ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Tag Questions ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Cue Words

This paper presents an acoustic-prosodic analysis of entrainment in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese. Our main goal is to analyze how turn-by-turn entrainment varies with distinct structural metadata events: types of sentence-like units (SUs) in consecutive turns (e.g. interrogatives followed by declaratives, or both declaratives), and with the presence of discourse markers, affirmative cue words, and disfluencies in the beginning of turns. Results show that entrainment at turn-exchanges occurs in terms of pitch, energy, duration, and voice quality. Considering SUs types, question-answer pairs are the ones with stronger similarity, as declarative-interrogative turns are the ones where less entrainment occurs. Moreover, in question-answer pairs, Yes/No and Tag questions present stronger evidences of entrainment than Wh- questions. Regarding turn-initial structures, there are evidences of (i) stronger entrainment when the second turn begins with an affirmative cue word, (ii) less strong with ambiguous structures (such as ‘OK’), emphatic affirmative answers, and negative cue words; (iii) and scarce with disfluencies and discourse markers. Different degrees of local entrainment may be related to the informative structure of distinct structural metadata events.

scholarly journals The Prosody of Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions in German

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 779-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Braun ◽  
Nicole Dehé ◽  
Jana Neitsch ◽  
Daniela Wochner ◽  
Katharina Zahner
Keyword(s):  
Information Seeking ◽  
Voice Quality ◽  
Question Type ◽  
High Rise ◽  
High Plateau ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
The Difference ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Rhetorical Questions ◽  
The Way

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking questions (ISQs) in German for two question types—polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth “ wh-questions”). The results are as follows: Phonologically, polar RQs were mainly realized with H-% (high plateau), while polar ISQs mostly ended in H-^H% (high-rise). Wh-RQs almost exclusively terminated in a low edge tone, whereas wh-ISQs allowed for more tonal variation (L-%, L-H%, H-^H%). Irrespective of question type, RQs were mainly produced with L*+H accents. Phonetically, RQs were more often realized with breathy voice quality than ISQs, in particular in the beginning of the interrogative. Furthermore, they were produced with longer constituent durations than ISQs, in particular at the end of the interrogative. While the difference between RQs and ISQs is reflected in the intonational terminus of the utterance, this does not happen in the way suggested in the semantic literature, and in addition, accent type and phonetic parameters also play a role. Crucially, a simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is insufficient to capture the realization of the different illocution types (RQs, ISQs), against frequent claims in the semantic and pragmatic literature. We suggest alternative ways to interpret the findings.

scholarly journals Discourse markers in English and European Portuguese translations: establishing functional equivalents and types of omission

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Milana Andreevna Morozova
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Original Language ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Target Languages

Based on the translations of a bidirectional English-Portuguese parallel corpus, this paper examines some English discourse markers (henceforth ‘DMs’, such as well, you know, I mean). The goal is twofold: firstly, the analysis of the translations establishes functional equivalents of the English DMs in European Portuguese, thus complementing the existing studies on translation of DMs in parallel corpus. Secondly and most importantly, this paper aims to approach the phenomenon of DMs omission frequently observed in translations from the empirical, rather than theoretical point of view. In particular, the study focuses on omission of DMs in the target languages. The corpus analysis resulted in the identification of three most common types of omission: DM deletion (i.e. a common DM deletion or omission in the target language), partial DM deletion (i.e. when one of the two DMs in the original language drops, resulting in translation of only one of them in the target language), DM addition (i.e. when there is no DM in the original language, but the translator has added it).

scholarly journals A comparative analysis of intonation between Spanish and English speakers in tag questions, wh-questions, inverted questions, and repetition questions

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Gabriela Valenzuela Farías
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Computer Program ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Tag Questions ◽  
Learning English

The aim of this study was to determine the differences and similarities in intonation when producing tag questions, wh-questions, inverted questions, and repetition questions among native English speakers and ESL Spanish speakers. These differences were measured and analyzed with a computer program called Praat, and the pitch, the intensity and the intonation contour were the focus of the study. The results have shown significant differences, as well as similarities between these two languages in some questions. The implication of this study is that the obtained data can help teachers and students to identify the problems that ESL Spanish speakers can have when learning English as a L2, especially with regards to intonation.

scholarly journals The Syntax of Clitic Placement in European Portuguese

2009 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-109
Author(s):  
Michael Barrie
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Lexical Feature ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Small Set ◽  
The Right ◽  
Clitic Placement

ABSTRACT In most Romance languages, object clitics appear to the left of the verb (proclitics); in European Portuguese (henceforth, EP) they appear to the right (enclitics). Furthermore, several syntactic environments trigger proclisis in EP, which usually have no effect on clitic placement in other Romance languages. These environments can be roughly split into two categories: those in which CP is filled (Wh-questions, focus constructions, subordinate clauses), and those in which a head position between CP and TP is filled (negation, special adverbs). To account for this, I propose that C0 in EP has the strong feature [+lexical] which must be checked by a lexical item before Spell-Out. I also propose the following clause structure: TopP>CP>AdvsP>NegP>TP>vP>VP. AdvsP is a functional projection which hosts any one of a small set of special adverbials. If CP is filled by Spell-Out (either in its head or specifier position), the [+lexical] feature will be checked and erased. If not, then C0 attracts the closest lexical item.

scholarly journals Cross-domain analysis of discourse markers in European Portuguese

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-106
Author(s):  
Vera Cabarrão ◽  
Helena Moniz ◽  
Fernando Batista ◽  
Jaime Ferreira ◽  
Isabel Trancoso ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pitch Range ◽  
Multidisciplinary Study ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Speech Corpora ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

This paper presents an analysis of discourse markers in two spontaneous speech corpora for European Portuguese - university lectures and map-task dialogues - and also in a collection of tweets, aiming at contributing to their categorization, scarcely existent for European Portuguese. Our results show that the selection of discourse markers is domain and speaker dependent. We also found that the most frequent discourse markers are similar in all three corpora, despite tweets containing discourse markers not found in the other two corpora. In this multidisciplinary study, comprising both a linguistic perspective and a computational approach, discourse markers are also automatically discriminated from other structural metadata events, namely sentence-like units and disfluencies. Our results show that discourse markers and disfluencies tend to co-occur in the dialogue corpus, but have a complementary distribution in the university lectures. We used three acoustic-prosodic feature sets and machine learning to automatically distinguish between discourse markers, disfluencies and sentence-like units. Our in-domain experiments achieved an accuracy of about 87% in university lectures and 84% in dialogues, in line with our previous results. The eGeMAPS features, commonly used for other paralinguistic tasks, achieved a considerable performance on our data, especially considering the small size of the feature set. Our results suggest that turn-initial discourse markers are usually easier to classify than disfluencies, a result also previously reported in the literature. We conducted a cross-domain evaluation in order to evaluate the robustness of the models across domains. The results achieved are about 11%-12% lower, but we conclude that data from one domain can still be used to classify the same events in the other. Overall, despite the complexity of this task, these are very encouraging state-of-the-art results. Ultimately, using exclusively acoustic-prosodic cues, discourse markers can be fairly discriminated from disfluencies and SUs. In order to better understand the contribution of each feature, we have also reported the impact of the features in both the dialogues and the university lectures. Pitch features are the most relevant ones for the distinction between discourse markers and disfluencies, namely pitch slopes. These features are in line with the wide pitch range of discourse markers, in a continuum from a very compressed pitch range to a very wide one, expressed by total deaccented material or H+L* L* contours, with upstep H tones.

scholarly journals A concordância em expressões nominais coordenadas com apenas um determinante

2018 ◽  
pp. 48-67
Author(s):  
Madalena Colaço ◽  
Carolina Gramacho
Keyword(s):  
Written Discourse ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Syntactic Derivation

This paper provides a corpus-based study of agreement in coordinate nominal expressions with only one determiner in European Portuguese. The data presented in our previous work attested the use of these expressions in written discourse, contradicting what is stated in some grammars. A distinction between two constructions is established: (a) those in which the coordinate nominal expression refers only one entity, which are commonly considered acceptable in grammatical descriptions; (b) those in which nouns are used to refer distinct entities, which are often considered anomalous or even ungrammatical. We focus especially on structures involving a singular determiner and two singular nouns and observe the type of agreement triggered by the nominal expression in each case: singular agreement versus plural agreement. Our proposal is based on the idea that these constructions correspond to structures that are distinct from the beginning of syntactic derivation, differing with respect to the coordinated categories (NP versus DP) and the number of determiners selected for the numeration (only one determiner from the beginning versus two determiners in the beginning and post-syntactic deletion of the second determiner), and provides a simple account of internal and external agreement facts.

scholarly journals A preliminary analysis of intonation patterns in Ecuadorian Cuencano Spanish

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-475
Author(s):  
Alex Portocarrero ◽  
Jesse Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Indices System ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Negative Statements ◽  
Tag Questions

Abstract El Cantado Cuencano “Cuencano singing” constitutes the hallmark of Cuencano Spanish: a widely spoken Andean dialect in the Ecuadorian province of Azuay. This colloquially described “singing” makes Cuencano Spanish one of the most distinct dialects of Ecuador. The aim of the present study is to provide a preliminary analysis of intonation patterns from common utterance types in this under documented dialect. A sample of 550 utterances from 11 categories that included declarative statements, yes/no questions, exclamative statements, wh-questions, imperatives, lists, conditionals, tag-questions, interjections, negative statements, and vocatives was collected from five male and five female participants. The tokens were analyzed acoustically and labeled using the Spanish Tones and Break Indices system (Sp_ToBI). Results reveal the presence of a tritonal pitch accent (PA), labeled as L + H* + L and the extensive use of bitonal PAs (namely, L + H*). These three phenomena mark the singing quality of Cuencano Spanish and make it stand out from the dialects of Ecuadorian Spanish.

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