The intonation of accessibility

Baumann, Stefan; Grice, Martine

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.03.017

Cited by 132 publications

(118 citation statements)

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“…The third reason concerns the link between pitch and information structure. Researchers have suggested that information packaging and degree of givenness interact with pitch (Brown, 1983;Steedman, 2000;Baumann and Grice, 2006). The utterance in (9) above is an example of this relation.…”

Section: Flatter Contoursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Sadat‐Tehrani

2017

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This paper is an introductory investigation, comparing the intonation of Persian declaratives in read and spontaneous speech styles. The results indicate that 32% of the 254 spontaneous declaratives studied show one or more of the following intonational differences: a high or downstepped high tone at Intonational Phrase end, marking the incompleteness of the message; the existence of more pauses leading to a greater number of Intonational Phrases, pre-pause vowel lengthening, and pitch reset; a flatter contour and less pitch variation caused by a speaker's boredom or givenness of the information content; an initial high boundary tone resulted from a low degree of assertiveness.Keywords: intonation, prosody, Persian, read speech, spontaneous speech, pitch track IntroductionThis research reports some preliminary observations regarding the differences between the intonational properties of read and spontaneous speech in Persian. In studies that make use of read speech (also known as lab speech), the speaker is provided with the written version of the test materials and is possibly given some instructions as to how to read them. This type of speech is usually elicited in a laboratory setting and done for a specific linguistic purpose. Spontaneous speech refers to utterances produced without any external stimulus, e.g., a natural conversation carried out between two interlocutors. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the intonational differences between the two styles. The research on Persian intonation done in the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonation (Bruce, 1977;Pierrehumbert, 1980;Ladd, 2008) has so far implemented controlled speech (Mahjani, 2003;Jun, et al., 2003;Sadat-Tehrani, 2007;Taheri and Xu, 2012;Hosseini, 2014;and Rahmani, Rietveld, and Gussenhoven, 2016), and to the best of my knowledge, there has not been any documentation on the distinguishing characteristics of read and spontaneous speech. This paper is an initial investigation of this issue.The present paper does not intend to argue for the use of spontaneous over read data; although the use of read speech has been criticized as unnatural and unrepresentative of real speech, it has its own merit. For instance, in a laboratory setting, the researcher has full control over many variables and determines their effect on intonation patterns, which is not the case when studying unscripted speech. Also, spontaneous data may not always contain all the structures that the researcher plans to investigate -for more arguments in favour of lab speech see Xu (2010). The view here, in line with that in Wagner, Trouvain, and Zimmerer (2015), is that making use of Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 2:06 PM

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Section: Flatter Contoursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

Sadat‐Tehrani

2017

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“…By deaccenting orangutan, a co-referential relation between the plumber in the utterance (7a) and the animal becomes highly likely, which creates a humorous impression. Further perception experiments confirmed that deaccented discourse parts are interpreted as information that co-refers to previous discourse (e.g., Baumann & Grice, 2006;Dahan et al, 2002). Conversely, it was found that accenting a co-referring discourse unit caused longer reaction times and was often judged as being inappropriate when the unit had been explicitly asked for in a preceding question.…”

Section: Deaccentuation and Discourse Structurementioning

confidence: 72%

“…This is often the case for information that was previously mentioned or can easily be inferred and is not contrastive to present information (e.g. for German, Baumann & Grice, 2006;Féry & Kügler, 2008;Grice et al, 2008). Listeners also expect that these "low-prominence" cues refer to something that is already known to them.…”

Section: Deaccentuation and Discourse Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

On the notion of salience in spoken discourse - prominence cues shaping discourse structure and comprehension

Falk¹

2014

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“…Studies have presented evidence that new information is marked with pitch accent where discourse-old or given information may not carry pitch accent at all (Baumann & Grice 2006). However, more careful study reveals that this simple dichotomy is insufficient to account for the relationship between prosody and information structure; the relationship seems to be much more gradient.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…These authors propose that deaccentuation is used anaphorically, pointing back to some antecedent that is accessible for the hearer. Baumann and Grice (2006) further develop this research program focusing explicitly on the relationship between discourse accessibility and pitch accent. These authors reinforce the variability in terms of givenness as well as accessibility, such that information can be given or accessible to varying…”

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confidence: 99%