Gesture, Prosody and Information Structure Synchronisation in Turkish

<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>

Gesture, Prosody and Information Structure Synchronisation in Turkish

<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>

Intonation and Referee Design Phenomena in the Narrative Speech of Black/Biracial Men

This study examines how men with one Black parent and one white parent variably construct their racial identities through both linguistic practice and explicit testimonials, with a specific focus on how this construction is realized in narratives about law enforcement. The data consist of interviews with five young men, aged 18-32, in Washington, D.C., and the analysis compares use of intonational phenomena associated with African American Language (AAL) in response to questions about aspects of their racial identities. Declarative intonational phrases from responses to questions were MAE-ToBi annotated and analyzed for use of intonational features subject to racialized stylistic variation, including use of L+H* versus H*, focus marking, and peak delay interval length. Results of multiple regression models indicate speakers avoid intonational features associated with AAL in police narratives, especially L+H* pitch accents with broad focus marking and longer peak delay intervals. These findings illuminate an important aspect of the relationship between linguistic performance and identity: both racial and linguistic identities are subject to topic and audience/referee-conditioned variation and individuals can use specific intonational variables to align themselves within specific audience and topic-influenced constraints. In the context of police narratives, avoidance of salient features of AAL intonation can serve as linguistic respectability politics; these speakers have motivation to employ linguistic behavior that distances them from the most societally and physically precarious implications of their identities.

Experimental approach of the prosodic component in the linguistic input of gardenpath sentences in Brazilian Portuguese

This study investigates what part the prosodic component plays in linguistic processing. Can prosodic cues be computed early in the linguistic process and influence the syntactic processing? Some studies in American English (Kjelgaard&Speer, 1999; DeDe 2010) and German (Steinhaueret al 1999) have shown that yes, furthermore, prosodic elements like intonational phrases can modify the syntactic chain during processing. Our work is based on the premises that, during the perceptive processing, an early activation of the prosodic component in the linguistic input can lead the sentence’s syntactic structure.There have been studies in Brazilian Portuguese that show how prosody influences parsing (Lourenço-Gomes 2008; Magalhães& Maia 2006), however, none that tested the effects of prosodic constituents’ organization in online tasks.

Topicalization in the Romance Languages

Topic and topicalization are key notions to understand processes of syntactic and prosodic readjustments in Romance. More specifically, topicalization refers to the syntactic mechanisms and constructions available in a language to mark an expression as the topic of the sentence. Despite the lack of a uniform definition of topic, often based on the notions of aboutness or givenness, significant advances have been made in Romance linguistics since the 1990s, yielding a better understanding of the topicalization constructions, their properties, and their grammatical correlates. Prosodically, topics are generally described as being contained in independent intonational phrases. The syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of a specific topicalization construction, by contrast, depend both on the form of resumption of the dislocated topic within the clause and on the types of topic (aboutness, given, and contrastive topics). We can thus distinguish between hanging topic (left dislocation) (HTLD) and clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) for sentence-initial topics, and clitic right-dislocation (ClRD) for sentence-final dislocated constituents. These topicalization constructions are available in most Romance languages, although variation may affect the type and the obligatory presence of the resumptive element. Scholars working on topic and topicalization in the Romance languages have also addressed controversial issues such as the relation between topics and subjects, both grammatical (nominative) subjects and ‘oblique’ subjects such as dative experiencers and locative expressions. Moreover, topicalization has been discussed for medieval Romance, in conjunction with its alleged V2 syntactic status. Some topicalization constructions such as subject inversion, especially in the non-null subject Romance languages, and Resumptive Preposing may indeed be viewed as potential residues of medieval V2 property in contemporary Romance.

Austronesia

While the Austronesian family is large, the main focus of this chapter is on the languages of the Philippines and Indonesia as very little is known about other parts of the family. In the languages analysed to date, intonational targets are often anchored to the edges rather than to metrically strong syllables, most intonational phrases ending with a major pitch excursion within a two- or three-syllable window. These languages often also lack evidence for word-based prominence (lexical stress), but in Philippine languages vowel length distinctions are phonemic and mobile, which is cross-linguistically unusual. Deviating from this general picture, languages in the southern half of Sulawesi and possibly further east tend to show word-based prominence on the penultimate syllable, with significant variation as to which clitics enter into the stress window. Lexical tone is only attested in small subgroups scattered across the area and generally due to language contact.

Prosodic Entanglement and the Anti-contiguity of Wh- and C

This chapter focuses on the syntax and prosody of wh- in-situ in Krachi. In Krachi, wh- in-situ is available in both root and embedded contexts. Prosodically, embedded complement clauses in the language are parsed as independent Intonational Phrases. The distribution of wh- in-situ in the language is considered against the backdrop of Richards’s (2010, 2016) Contiguity Theory. Given the prosodic facts previously mentioned, Contiguity Theory is shown to be incapable of accounting for long-distance wh- in-situ in the language, motivating an “anti-contiguity” theory of the prosody of wh- and C at the syntax-phonology interface.

Configuraciones tonales de frases entonativas en enunciados aseverativos del español de la Ciudad de México

The objective of this paper is to describe the prosodic features of the final intonation contour of minor intonational phrases (ip) and the tonemes of major intonational phrases (IP) in Mexico City’s Spanish variety. The speech data was taken from a spontaneous speech corpus made from speakers from two social networks: neighborhood and labor. Final intonation contours of ip show a predominantly rising movement. These contours are generally produced with greater length in the last syllable of the ip, which represents the most significant difference between both networks in the case of oxitone endings. On the other hand, tonemes are predominantly descendant, although the circumflex accent has an important number of cases within the data set. Tonemes produced by the neighborhood network are produced with larger length than those from the labor network.

Pausal Forms and Prosodic Structure in Tiberian Hebrew

Vincent DeCaen and Elan Dresher investigate the reasons that pausal forms in Tiberian Hebrew, which are expected to occur at the end of ‘intonational phrases’, at times appear where Tiberian accents are conjunctive rather than disjunctive. They challenge an earlier opinion that such mismatches represent different traditions or stages of interpreting the biblical text, maintaining instead that these mismatches are due to limitations inherent in the Tiberian system of accents.

Phases, labeling, antilocality and intonational phrases: recomplementation in Spanish

This paper addresses recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer constructions) in Spanish, comparing Latin American Spanish (LAS) and European Spanish (ES). I make the novel observation that in spite of a superficial difference whereby a lower que after a left dislocate (LD) surfaces in ES but not in LAS, LAS does have recomplementation. In fact, LAS patterns with ES in that there are two constructions in each variety, i.e. a construction in which an intonational break following the LD is present and a construction in which the break is absent. I argue that the constructions with the break differ from the constructions without it with regard to reconstruction effects, no insertion and the position of high adverbs, which arise due to a locality violation in the former but not in the latter. I propose a syntactic analysis in terms of phases and argue that the locality violation is circumvented in the constructions with no break via verb movement, which is not possible in the constructions with the break. I further propose a mapping from the syntactic structures of recomplementation into prosody that correlates with the presence/absence of the intonational break in these constructions, hence providing prosodic evidence for phasal structure more generally.