The Reflexes of Focus in Phonology

音韵学中焦点的反射

• 批准号: 0004038
• 负责人: Elisabeth Selkirk
• 金额: $ 18.49万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-08-15 至 2005-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0004038&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Reflexes; Focus; Phonology

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.

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Elisabeth Selkirk博士和她的同事将对英语、日语和塔什希特柏柏尔语进行为期三年的语言研究。该项目将调查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、音韵短语和相对音高范围。语义变量包括句子是否包含对比更正、反断言或新信息的呈现。操纵语义变量的材料将被演员读取并记录。计算机提取的记录材料中的音高轮廓将被分析，以建立语义和韵律特性之间的相关性。听力实验将测试说话者作为不同焦点类型反射而产生的韵律对比是否影响句子理解。在不同的词和句子韵律的语言中，对相似点的跨语言比较测试。虽然英语不使用音调来区分词汇项，但它确实利用句子级别的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，但它确实用音调来区分词汇项。柏柏尔语与英语和日语不同，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。使用这种结构的句子的音高轮廓将与包含其他焦点类型的句子进行比较，以查看当焦点已经通过其他方式表示时是否出现任何特殊的韵律。争论的焦点是语言是否能避免不同系统之间的冗余来表达相同的语义属性。这种对韵律和语义焦点的跨语言研究具有重要意义，原因如下。首先是语言的普遍属性问题。这项研究的问题是，在这些不同的语言中，焦点的抽象音系是否普遍存在（例如，短语重音突出系统）。其次，更好地理解句子的韵律特性如何影响其语义解释或其在特定话语中的适当性，将有助于更深入地理解音系和其他语言能力领域之间的接口。在实践领域，更好的关于语义或语用相关韵律的描述性概括将促进基于计算机的口语治疗，在人类句子处理研究中使用自然语音，以及评估语言障碍。这笔赠款还将通过与摩洛哥柏柏尔学者Abdelkrim Jebbour博士的合作，促进国际合作。它也将有助于培养研究生分析韵律以及与韵律相关的句法、语义、语音和语音特性。