An Autosegmental-Metrical Analysis and Prosodic Annotation Conventions for Cantonese

Wong, Wai Yi; Chan, Marjorie K. M.; Beckman, Mary E.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249633.003.0010

Cited by 45 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…While languages employ individual strategies to express these pragmatic distinctions, many often use prosody to distinguish between two or more of these pragmatic types. For example, languages including Cantonese, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese use prosody to distinguish information-from confirmationseeking questions (Wong et al 2005, for Cantonese; Grice et al 2005;Savino & Grice 2011, for Italian;Venditti et al 2006, for English;Venditti 2005, for Japanese; Santos & Mata 2008;Vigário & Frota 2003, for Portuguese). Additionally, German, Chickasaw, and Swedish differentiate information-seeking from echo questions through their use of prosody (Grice et al 2005, for German;Gordon 2005, for Chickasaw;House 2002, 2003.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

Thorson

Borràs-Comes

Crespo-Sendra

et al. 2015

Probus

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This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no-interrogatives of Catalan-and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011;Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan-and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no-interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

Thorson

Borràs-Comes

Crespo-Sendra

et al. 2015

Probus

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“…Although some tone languages have stress in addition to tone, as for example Mandarin Chinese, others do not, for instance Cantonese Chinese (cf. Peng et al 2005;Wong et al 2005). Interestingly, even in Mandarin, the phonetic effects of focus have been transcribed as boundary tones and not as pitch accents on stressed syllables in Peng et al (2005).…”

Section: Butmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developments in the Study of Intonational Typology

Zerbian

2010

Language and Linguist. Compass

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The paper describes recent developments in the study of intonation as they contribute to the goal of an intonational typology. Although intonation research is a long‐established research field, investigations of cross‐linguistic variation in intonation are more recent. The availability of technological support has advanced the field tremendously, both methodologically and intellectually, facilitating cross‐linguistic comparisons. The practical demand for speech technology applications has further advanced research in the field. Cross‐dialectal variation in intonation promises to continue being a thriving research field in the coming years. The paper discusses why no typology of intonation exists as yet and shows that typologically relevant parameters are being filtered out and delineated by work currently being carried out.

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“…The parallelism motivates a unified analysis of both phenomena because, on the one hand, the two sets of XPs seem strikingly similar, and on the other hand, they both give rise to focus readings, as the question/answer diagnostic has shown. As Cantonese lacks NS (Wong et al 2005), the NSR has to be decoupled from NS to capture the parallel between the NSR and the Spine Constraint. I propose that the NSR should be recast as an abstract rule of focus assignment based on syntactic structure, which I will call the Abstract NSR 22 (ANSR).…”

Section: (Abstract) Nsrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

Cheung

2009

J East Asian Linguist

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The use of the Dislocation Focus Construction (DFC) (also known as ''Right Dislocation'') in colloquial Chinese (including Cantonese and Mandarin) gives rise to various non-canonical word orders. In DFCs, the sentence particle (SP) occurs in a sentence-medial position. The pre-and post-SP materials are demonstrated to be syntactically connected, based on four diagnostic tests, namely (i) the zinghai 'only' test, (ii) the doudai (''wh-the-hell'') test, (iii) polarity item licensing, and (iv) Principle C violations. The findings offer new insights into the syntax of the Chinese left periphery and constraints on focus movement. First, the observations entail that Chinese CPs are head-initial, and an XP is obligatorily moved around the SP to a position higher than the CP. Second, the XP-raising in the DFC is argued to be driven by focus because of the focus interpretation induced. It is discovered that the focus movement is subject to the Spine Constraint, which turns out to be remarkably similar to the properties of the Nuclear Stress Rule (e.g., selection of focus set and metrical invisibility). It is argued that the DFC is the syntactic realization of the rule.

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An Autosegmental-Metrical Analysis and Prosodic Annotation Conventions for Cantonese

Cited by 45 publications

References 11 publications

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

Developments in the Study of Intonational Typology

Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

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