scholarly journals Gesture, Prosody and Information Structure Synchronisation in Turkish

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Olcay Turk
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Gesture Production

<p>This thesis investigates the synchronisation of gesture with prosody and information structure in Turkish. Speech and gesture have a close relationship in human communication, and they are tightly coordinated in production. Research has shown that gestural units are synchronised with prosodic units on a prominence-related micro level (i.e., pitch accents and gesture apexes), however these studies have largely been on a small number of languages of a similar prosodic type, not including Turkish, which has prominence-less prosodic words. It is known that both gesture and speech, through prosody, are hierarchically structured with nested phrasal constituents, but little is known about gesture-prosody synchronisation at this macro level. Even less is known about the timing relationships of gesture with information structure, which is also closely related to prosody. This thesis links gesture to information structure as a part of a three-way synchronisation relationship of gesture, prosody, and information structure.  Four participants were filmed in a narrative task, resulting in three hours of Turkish natural speech and gesture data. Selected sections were annotated for prosody using an adapted scheme for Turkish in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework, for information structure and for gesture. In total, there were over 20,000 annotations.  The synchronisation of gesture and speech units was systematically investigated at (1) the micro level, and (2) the macro level. At the micro level, this thesis asked which tones apexes are synchronised with, and whether this synchronisation depends on other prosodic and gestural features. It was found that gesture apexes were synchronised with pitch accents if there were pitch accents in the relevant prosodic phrases; if not, they were synchronised with low tones that marked the onsets of prosodic words. This synchronisation pattern was largely consistent across different prosodic and gestural contexts, although it was tighter in the nuclear area. These findings confirm prominence as a constraint on synchronisation with evidence of pitch accent-apex synchronisation. The findings also extend our knowledge of the typology of micro-level synchronisation to cases where prominence is locally absent showing that micro-level synchronisation also obeys the prosodic hierarchy.  At the macro level, the aim was to find the prosodic anchor for single gesture phrases while testing for the possible effects of prosodic, gestural and information structural contexts. The findings showed that there was no one-to-one synchronisation of single gesture phrases with single intermediate or intonational phrases. However, it was found that gesture phrases often spanned over multiple consecutive intermediate phrases, and the synchronisation of gesture phrase boundaries was with the boundaries of these intermediate phrase groupings. In addition, these groupings tended to be combinations of pre-nuclear and nuclear intermediate phrases constituting the default focus position in Turkish. This synchronisation behaviour over the focal domain implied that there might be another speech element governing the speech-gesture synchronisation which also informs prosody, i.e. information structure.  Based on this finding and a few other associations in the earlier studies, it was hypothesised that gesture is also informed by and synchronised with information structure. In order to test this hypothesis, it was investigated whether gesture phrases were synchronised with information structural units, i.e., topics, foci and background. The findings showed that gesture phrases tended to accompany discursively prominent foci over topics and background. However, gesture phrases did not show perfect synchronisation with any of these information structure units, although there was a systematic overlap in which foci and topics were contained within the duration of complete gesture phrases. Further investigations revealed that gesture phrase parts that bear apex related meaning provided a much better anchor for the synchronisation of information structure units. The preference for accompanying and synchronisation with the parts of gesture bearing gesturally prominent apical meaning also highlighted that prominence is a driving factor of synchronisation at the macro level as well as at the micro level.  This thesis has revealed pivotal links between gesture, prosody and information structure through a systematic investigation of synchronisation of these structures. The implications of these links have also been discussed within the thesis, and a model of speech and gesture production integrating synchronisation has been proposed. Overall, the thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of speech and gesture production, explaining how these interact during natural speech.</p>

scholarly journals Gesture, Prosody and Information Structure Synchronisation in Turkish

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Olcay Turk
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Gesture Production

<p>This thesis investigates the synchronisation of gesture with prosody and information structure in Turkish. Speech and gesture have a close relationship in human communication, and they are tightly coordinated in production. Research has shown that gestural units are synchronised with prosodic units on a prominence-related micro level (i.e., pitch accents and gesture apexes), however these studies have largely been on a small number of languages of a similar prosodic type, not including Turkish, which has prominence-less prosodic words. It is known that both gesture and speech, through prosody, are hierarchically structured with nested phrasal constituents, but little is known about gesture-prosody synchronisation at this macro level. Even less is known about the timing relationships of gesture with information structure, which is also closely related to prosody. This thesis links gesture to information structure as a part of a three-way synchronisation relationship of gesture, prosody, and information structure.  Four participants were filmed in a narrative task, resulting in three hours of Turkish natural speech and gesture data. Selected sections were annotated for prosody using an adapted scheme for Turkish in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework, for information structure and for gesture. In total, there were over 20,000 annotations.  The synchronisation of gesture and speech units was systematically investigated at (1) the micro level, and (2) the macro level. At the micro level, this thesis asked which tones apexes are synchronised with, and whether this synchronisation depends on other prosodic and gestural features. It was found that gesture apexes were synchronised with pitch accents if there were pitch accents in the relevant prosodic phrases; if not, they were synchronised with low tones that marked the onsets of prosodic words. This synchronisation pattern was largely consistent across different prosodic and gestural contexts, although it was tighter in the nuclear area. These findings confirm prominence as a constraint on synchronisation with evidence of pitch accent-apex synchronisation. The findings also extend our knowledge of the typology of micro-level synchronisation to cases where prominence is locally absent showing that micro-level synchronisation also obeys the prosodic hierarchy.  At the macro level, the aim was to find the prosodic anchor for single gesture phrases while testing for the possible effects of prosodic, gestural and information structural contexts. The findings showed that there was no one-to-one synchronisation of single gesture phrases with single intermediate or intonational phrases. However, it was found that gesture phrases often spanned over multiple consecutive intermediate phrases, and the synchronisation of gesture phrase boundaries was with the boundaries of these intermediate phrase groupings. In addition, these groupings tended to be combinations of pre-nuclear and nuclear intermediate phrases constituting the default focus position in Turkish. This synchronisation behaviour over the focal domain implied that there might be another speech element governing the speech-gesture synchronisation which also informs prosody, i.e. information structure.  Based on this finding and a few other associations in the earlier studies, it was hypothesised that gesture is also informed by and synchronised with information structure. In order to test this hypothesis, it was investigated whether gesture phrases were synchronised with information structural units, i.e., topics, foci and background. The findings showed that gesture phrases tended to accompany discursively prominent foci over topics and background. However, gesture phrases did not show perfect synchronisation with any of these information structure units, although there was a systematic overlap in which foci and topics were contained within the duration of complete gesture phrases. Further investigations revealed that gesture phrase parts that bear apex related meaning provided a much better anchor for the synchronisation of information structure units. The preference for accompanying and synchronisation with the parts of gesture bearing gesturally prominent apical meaning also highlighted that prominence is a driving factor of synchronisation at the macro level as well as at the micro level.  This thesis has revealed pivotal links between gesture, prosody and information structure through a systematic investigation of synchronisation of these structures. The implications of these links have also been discussed within the thesis, and a model of speech and gesture production integrating synchronisation has been proposed. Overall, the thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of speech and gesture production, explaining how these interact during natural speech.</p>

Some properties of texts in terms of ‘information distribution’ across languages

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Information Distribution ◽  
Intuitive Notion ◽  
Micro Level

On a global level, an attempt will be made to relate relatively macro-level intuitions about properties of texts to more micro-level notions and to empirically testable lexicogrammatical properties. The strategy will be to (a) partly reduce an intuitive notion of ‘information distribution’ in texts and sentences to more technical and better understood notions of ‘information structure’, ‘informational density’ and ‘grammatical metaphoricity’, and (b) operationalize these latter notions in such a way as to make them empirically testable on electronic corpora, using the ‘shallow’ concepts of ‘explicitness, density, and directness’ as properties of semantics-to-grammar mapping in sentences. It will furthermore be suggested that aspects of intuitive qualities of texts, such as ‘content orientation’ vs. ‘interactant orientation’ and others can be partly modelled in terms of (a) and (b). The argumentation in this paper thus proceeds from intuitive text-level notions to more technical and clause-based concepts, and from these concepts to operationalizations. It then moves ‘upwards’ again to text-level properties, exploring the relationships between the two levels. Finally, an outline is attempted of some implications for studies of language contact and language change.

Varieties of non-obvious meaning in CL and CADS: from ‘hindsight post-dictability’ to sweet serendipity

Corpora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Partington
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Special Relevance

In this paper, I want to examine the special relevance of (non)obviousness in corpus linguistics through drawing on case studies. The research discussion is divided into two parts. The first is an examination of (non)obviousness at the micro-level, that is, in lexico-grammatical analyses, whilst the second looks at the more macro-level of (non)obviousness on the plane of discourse. In the final sections, I will examine various types of non-obvious meaning one can come across in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), which range from: ‘I knew that all along (now)’ to ‘that's interesting’ to ‘I sensed that but didn't know why’ (intuitive impressions and corpus-assisted explanations) to ‘I never even knew I never knew that’ (serendipity or ‘non-obvious non-obviousness’, analogous to ‘unknown unknowns’).

Panpsychism versus Panprotopsychism and the Subject-Summing Problem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Goff
Keyword(s):  
Macro Level ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Combination Problem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Russellian Monism ◽  
Nature Of Matter

This is the first of two chapters discussing the most notorious problem facing Russellian monism: the combination problem. This is actually a family of difficulties, each reflecting the challenge of how to make sense of everyday human and animal experience intelligibly arising from more fundamental conscious or protoconscious features of reality. Key challenges facing panpsychist and panpsychist forms of Russellian monism are considered. With respect to panprotopsychism, there is the worry that it collapses into noumenalism: the view that human beings, by their very nature, are unable to understand the concrete, categorical nature of matter. With respect to panpsychism, there is the subject-summing problem: the difficulty making sense of how micro-level conscious subjects combine to produce macro-level conscious subjects. A solution to the subject-summing problem is proposed, and it is ultimately argued that panpsychist forms of the Russellian monism are to be preferred on grounds of simplicity and elegance.

scholarly journals Young Children’s Belonging in Finnish Educational Settings: an Intersectional Analysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maija Puroila ◽  
Jaana Juutinen ◽  
Elina Viljamaa ◽  
Riikka Sirkko ◽  
Taina Kyrönlampi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Educational Policy ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Educational Settings ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Positional Power ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Similarities And Differences

AbstractThe study draws on a relational and intersectional approach to young children’s belonging in Finnish educational settings. Belonging is conceptualized as a multilevel, dynamic, and relationally constructed phenomenon. The aim of the study is to explore how children’s belonging is shaped in the intersections between macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of young children’s education in Finland. The data consist of educational policy documents and ethnographic material generated in educational programs for children aged birth to 8 years. A situational mapping framework is used to analyze and interpret the data across and within systems levels (macro-level; meso-level; and micro-level). The findings show that the landscape in which children’s belonging is shaped and the intersections across and within the levels are characterized by the tensions between similarities and differences, majority and minorities, continuity and change, authority and agency. Language used, practices enacted, and positional power emerge as the (re)sources through which children’s (un)belonging is actively produced.

Focus Attracts Attachment

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092110333
Author(s):  
Katy Carlson ◽  
David Potter
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Focus Position ◽  
Auditory Comprehension ◽  
Perceptual Salience ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Prosodic Boundaries ◽  
Sentence Interpretation ◽  
Pitch Accents

There is growing evidence that pitch accents as well as prosodic boundaries can affect syntactic attachment. But is this an effect of their perceptual salience (the Salience Hypothesis), or is it because accents mark the position of focus (the Focus Attraction Hypothesis)? A pair of auditory comprehension experiments shows that focus position, as indicated by preceding wh-questions instead of by pitch accents, affects attachment by drawing the ambiguous phrase to the focus. This supports the Focus Attraction Hypothesis (or a pragmatic version of salience) for both these results and previous results of accents on attachment. These experiments show that information structure, as indicated with prosody or other means, influences sentence interpretation, and suggests a view on which modifiers are drawn to the most important information in a sentence.

scholarly journals The Role of Prosodic Breaks and Pitch Accents in Grouping Words during On-line Sentence Processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 2447-2467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Bögels ◽  
Herbert Schriefers ◽  
Wietske Vonk ◽  
Dorothee J. Chwilla
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
On Line ◽  
Group Words ◽  
Pitch Accents

The present study addresses the question whether accentuation and prosodic phrasing can have a similar function, namely, to group words in a sentence together. Participants listened to locally ambiguous sentences containing object- and subject-control verbs while ERPs were measured. In Experiment 1, these sentences contained a prosodic break, which can create a certain syntactic grouping of words, or no prosodic break. At the disambiguation, an N400 effect occurred when the disambiguation was in conflict with the syntactic grouping created by the break. We found a similar N400 effect without the break, indicating that the break did not strengthen an already existing preference. This pattern held for both object- and subject-control items. In Experiment 2, the same sentences contained a break and a pitch accent on the noun following the break. We argue that the pitch accent indicates a broad focus covering two words [see Gussenhoven, C. On the limits of focus projection in English. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: University Press, 1999], thus grouping these words together. For object-control items, this was semantically possible, which led to a “good-enough” interpretation of the sentence. Therefore, both sentences were interpreted equally well and the N400 effect found in Experiment 1 was absent. In contrast, for subject-control items, a corresponding grouping of the words was impossible, both semantically and syntactically, leading to processing difficulty in the form of an N400 effect and a late positivity. In conclusion, accentuation can group words together on the level of information structure, leading to either a semantically “good-enough” interpretation or a processing problem when such a semantic interpretation is not possible.

The prospects for pluralism in contract theory

Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Zhong Xing Tan
Keyword(s):  
Contract Theory ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Micro Level

Abstract This paper explores the promise of pluralism in the realm of contract law. I begin by identifying and rejecting conceptual strategies adopted by monistic and dualistic approaches. Turning towards pluralism, I evaluate three versions in contemporary literature: pluralism across contracting spheres and types, pluralism through consensus and convergence, and pluralism through localised values-balancing and practical reasoning. I suggest embracing some pluralism about contract pluralism, by using these models to construct a framework of ‘meta-pluralism’, where at the macro-level, we are concerned with plural spheres of contracting activity; at the meso-level, a variety of trans-substantive interpretive concepts that receive some measure of juristic consensus; and at the micro-level, practical reasoning through particularistic analysis of case-specific considerations. I illustrate the meta-pluralistic framework through a case study on the varieties of specific performance, and explain how the proposed pluralistic framework enriches our understanding of the nature of contract.

Building Meaning

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Bargenda
Keyword(s):  
Banking Sector ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Systems Architecture ◽  
Built Form ◽  
Dialectical Perspective ◽  
Marketing Systems ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Corporate Architecture

This conceptual article seeks to demonstrate the pertinence of corporate architecture as an integrative tool in spatial marketing systems. Architecture is explored in a dialectical perspective, both as a functional built form and a symbolic vector of ideologies. Architecture intersects with micro-level and macro-level marketing systems, as it inherently projects corporate identity while referring to broader artistic, social and historical parameters. It is argued that these macromarketing dimensions and their meaning-generating potential add significant value to market exchanges. A special focus on corporate architecture in the banking sector shows the value of architectural narratives in changing marketing environments. The article makes two contributions to macromarketing research. It (1) firmly establishes corporate architecture within marketing systems and (2) shows how symbolic meaning can be derived from the macro-level environmental, historical and cultural properties of buildings.

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