The Reflexes of Focus in Phonology

在国家科学基金会的支持下，伊丽莎白塞尔柯克博士和她的同事将对英语、日语和塔什利特柏柏尔语进行为期三年的语言学研究。这个项目将研究韵律和语义定义的焦点类型之间的关系。韵律变量包括音高重音的存在和分布、音位短语和相对音高范围。语义变量包括一个句子是否涉及对比校正，反断言或新信息的呈现。操纵语义变量的材料将由演员阅读并记录。计算机提取的音高轮廓记录的材料，然后进行分析，以建立语义和韵律属性之间的相关性。听力实验将测试说话人作为不同焦点类型的反射产生的韵律对比是否影响句子理解。跨语言比较测试在单词和句子韵律不同的语言中的相似点。虽然英语不使用音调来区分词汇，但它确实在句子层面上利用音调重音来标记焦点类型。相比之下，日语不使用句子级别的重音来标记焦点类型，但它确实用音调区分词汇。与英语和日语不同，柏柏尔语用一种特殊的句法结构来表示一个成分的对比地位。我们会将这种结构的句子的音高轮廓与包含其他焦点类型的句子进行比较，看看当焦点已经通过其他方式表示时是否会出现任何特殊的韵律。争论的焦点是语言是否会避免不同系统之间表达相同语义属性的冗余。韵律和语义焦点的跨语言研究有几个原因。首先是语言的普遍属性问题。这项研究询问焦点的抽象音位是否在这些不同的语言中是共同的（例如，短语重音突出系统）。其次，更好地了解句子的韵律特性如何影响其语义解释或其在特定语篇中的适当性，将有助于更深入地了解音位学与其他语言能力领域之间的界面。在实践领域，更好的描述性概括语义或语用相关的韵律将推进基于计算机的口语治疗，使用自然语音在人类句子处理的研究，和评估语言障碍。这笔赠款还将通过与来自摩洛哥的柏柏尔学者Abdelkrim Jebeur博士的合作，促进国际合作。它也将有助于研究生的韵律分析和句法，语义，语音和语音特性，是相关的韵律的培训。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Elisabeth Selkirk and her colleagues will conduct three years of linguistic research on English, Japanese, and Tashlhit Berber. The project will investigate relations between prosody and semantically defined types of Focus. Prosodic variables include the presence and distribution of pitch accents, phonological phrasing, and relative pitch range. Semantic variables include whether a sentence involves a contrastive correction, a counter-assertion, or presentation of new information. Materials manipulating semantic variables will be read by actors and recorded. Computer-extracted pitch contours in the recorded materials will then be analyzed to establish correlations between semantic and prosodic properties. Listening experiments will test whether the prosodic contrasts that speakers produced as reflexes of different Focus types influence sentence comprehension. The cross-linguistic comparison tests for points of similarity in languages that differ in word and sentence prosody. While English makes no use of tones to differentiate lexical items, it does exploit tonal accents at the sentence level to mark Focus types. By contrast, Japanese makes no use of sentence level accents to mark Focus types, but it does differentiate lexical items with tone. Berber, unlike English and Japanese, indicates the contrastive status of a constituent with a special syntactic construction. The pitch contours of sentences with this construction will be compared to sentences containing other Focus types to see whether any special prosody occur when Focus is already indicated by other means. What's at issue is whether languages avoid redundancy between different systems for expressing the same semantic properties.This cross-linguistic study of prosody and semantic Focus is significant for several reasons. First is the question of universal properties of language. The research asks whether an abstract phonology of Focus is common across these different languages (e.g., a system of phrasal stress prominence). Second, better understanding of how prosodic properties of a sentence influence its semantic interpretation or its appropriateness in a specific discourse would permit a deeper understanding of the interface between phonology and other domains of linguistic competence. In the practical realm, better descriptive generalizations concerning semantically or pragmatically relevant prosody would advance computer-based treatments of spoken language, uses of natural speech in research on human sentence processing, and the assessment of language impairments. The grant will also advance international collaboration, through cooperation with Dr. Abdelkrim Jebbour, a Berber scholar from Morocco. It will also contribute to the training of graduate students in the analysis of prosody and of syntactic, semantic, phonological, and phonetic properties that are relevant to prosody.