The deadline for Mosaic 2 was extended. Monday is the final day to submit a paper!
Mosaic is a workshop bringing together semanticists active in Canada. It’s a satellite meeting of the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
Statistics Workshop on Logit Mixed Models, May 3-4 2010 at McGill
The gripp reading group and the CRLMB are organzing a statistics workshop on logit mixed models. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester) and his lab will give several tutorials on this and related topics on May 3 and 4 (we might have a 3rd day though). The workshop is co-sponsored by the CRLMB, prosody.lab, the Mcgill Infant Development Cluster, and the PoP lab, and is organized by Aparna Nadig, Kris Onishi and me.
Further information will be posted in early March. Hope to see you there!
I was about to write if worse comes to worst in an email, and then realized that I’m actually not sure what the correct idiom exactly is. The difference between worse and worst is hard to hear, and it’s not so clear that it has a transparent compositional meaning, so neither sound nor meaning really help. A quick Google vote seemed to resolve this, but not in an entirely crisp way:
“worst comes to worst” – 149.000 hits
“worse comes to worst” – 47.800 hits
“worst comes to worse” – 578.000 hits
“worse comes to worse” – 7.370.00 hits
So I went with ‘worse comes to worse.’ However, the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English usage states that the original phrase is ‘if the worst comes to the worst,’ first used in 1597, and then goes to say that
More …The name of the car company and that of its president and CEO (a grandson of its founder Kiichiro Toyoda) are homophonous (or at least nearly homophonous)–in North American English, that is. Both [t] and [d] become flaps intervocalically after a stressed syllable.
It’s interesting though to see what people do when they want to emphasize which one of the two words were intended. According to various people I’ve polled (some of them currently taking my experimental class at the moment), one way to disambiguate is to shift stress to the last syllable and thus bleed the application of flapping.
This is an example of focus within-word focus. In his 1961 paper on contrastive accent and contrastive stress Dwight Bolinger describes another instance:
In a New Yorker cartoon a man stands upside down, with feet on the ceiling, in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist says to the man’s wife, ‘In a case of this kind, Mrs. Hall, our first concern is to persuade the patient that he is a stalagmite’ (last syllable underlined in original).
There’s a nice paper byRon Artstein that discusses the semantics of this kind of focus below he word level.
It’s conceivable though that a speaker might shift stress even in the absence of such a contrasting minimal pair, in order to clarify the spelling (or underlying form?) of a word. If this way of avoiding flapping became a regular process, it would constitute a violation of a generalization that is otherwise very robust, (the ‘two-many-solutions-problem’, see Donca Steriade’s paper on the P-Map and
Lev Blumenfeld’s 2006 thesis): Prosodically conditioned lenition-processes such as foot-internal flapping are not mirrored by hypothetical processes that would shift stress for the purpose of avoiding the lenition to apply. This is surprising under an optimality-theoretic analysis of such processes that uses the interaction of markedness and faithfulness constraints, since shifting stress would be another way to avoid the markedness-violation incurred by intervocalic post-tonic [t] or [d], so it would be easy to create a correct ranking for such a grammar. However, languages don’t ever seem to pick this solution. They either stay faithful or lenite.
So does the English strategy to emphasize the underlying (or at least orthographic) contrast between ‘Toyota’ and ‘Toyoda’ show that this generalization is not really true? Maybe not: for all we know, the stress shift observed here might be an acrobatic act that savvy users of English use to disambiguate otherwise homophonous words based on their own phonological knowledge, but not something that could ever become a regular grammatical process that could be generalized to all flapping environments.
On the other hand, maybe such a process is simply unlikely to be develop: Languages might conserve a contrast (as in languages that don’t have flapping, say British English) or lenite–but under what scenario would a language develop a stress shift that serves the purpose of avoiding a neutralization brought about by a lenition process which, however, could never be observed in the first place if there were a stress shift? Developing such a pre-emptive phonological process might simply be an unlikely scenario for a language change.
Shifting stress is different from other forms of enhancement (which one could argue are similarly pre-emptive) since it comes at the cost of changing a property that itself is contrastive in English, word-stress. Another difference might be that shifting stress does not exaggerate a tendency that is already present with the original contrast (That’s an empirical question: Could a hyper-articulated rendition of [toi!] in French at times be aspirated? Could a hyper-articulated British English rendition of [water] at times shift stress to the last syllable? It seems to me the former is much more likely than the latter, but maybe I’m wrong).
So it’s not so obvious that there is a ‘two-many-solutions’ problem in this case. Of course, this type of explanation might only be feasible in a small subset of cases in which the ‘two-many-solutions’ problem has been observed.
[some edits on February 9, 2010]
The TIE conference series brings together researchers working on different aspects of tone and intonation in a wide variety of languages. Abstracts for papers and posters are welcome on any topic within these areas.
The WCCFL program has been posted. There’s lots of interesting papers on prosody on the program, including some from McGill: by David-Etienne Bouchard (on clitic in French), Öner Öçelik and Miho Nagai (Syntax-Prosody in Turkish), Hyekyung Hwang, Moti Lieberman, Heather Goad, & Lydia White (on prosodic diambiguation), Walter Pederson (on ‘again’), and yet another one by Heather Goad and Lydia White (on prosodic transfer). There’s also a talk by Nikola Predolac, who is just finishing his thesis at Cornell, on givenness and the scope of focus operators in Serbian. Lots of other interesting prosody stuff on the program, including an invited talk by Duane Watson. Can’t believe I can’t go…
Speech Prosody will take place in Chicago this year. There’s a special session on Experimental Approaches to Focus, organized by Yi Xu which promises to be interesting.
prosodylab will be represented at speech prosody with two posters in the main session. drop me an email if you’re interested in the drafts:
M. Wagner, M. Breen, E. Flemming, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & E. Gibson: Prosodic Effects of Discourse Salience and Association with Focus.
Abtract: Three factors that have been argued to influence the prosody of
an utterance are (i) which constituents encode discourse-salient
information; (ii) which constituents are contrastive in that they
evoke alternatives; and (iii) which constituents interact with
the meaning of focus operators such as only (i.e., they ‘associate’
with focus). One challenge for a better understanding of
these factors has been the difficulty of finding a way to evaluate
hypotheses quantitatively, since individual variation in productions
is often large enough to wash out experimental effects.
In this paper, we apply a methodology introduced in [1] which
regresses out subject and item variation, uncovering otherwise
hidden prosodic patterns that illustrate how the three factors interact
in sentences containing single or multiple foci.
Wagner, Michael & Serena Crivellaro: Relative Prosodic Boundary Strength and Prior Bias in Disambiguation
Abstract: Previous research found that the relative rather than the absolute
size of prosodic boundaries is crucial in disambiguating
attachment ambiguities [1, 2]. Furthermore, relative categorical
differences matter whereas merely quantitative ones do not
[1]. This paper presents further evidence that relative boundary
strength is indeed what is crucial, but, contrary to earlier findings,
gradient quantitative differences in boundary rank affect
parsing decisions in gradient ways. Furthermore, varying the
plausibility of a given reading in a given context shifts the perceptual
boundaries between different phrasings such that quantitatively
stronger prosodic cues are necessary to counter-act a
prior bias against it.
A couple of weeks ago my article “Prosody and Recursion in Coordinate Structures and Beyond” was posted online by Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Here’s the abstract:
Generalizations about relative prosodic boundary strength are recursive. Initial evidence comes from the fragment of English consisting only of proper names and and and or. A systematic relation between the semantics, the syntactic combinatorics, and the prosodic phrasing of coordinate structures can be captured by recursively building up their prosody, in tandem with assembling their compositional meaning. Alternative edge-based approaches to prosodic phrasing fail to capture the recursive nature of the generalization, a result independent of whether or not prosodic representation itself is assumed to be recursive. The pattern generalizes beyond the grammar of coordination, despite two types of apparent counterexamples: Structures that are prosodically flat but syntactically articulated, and structures with an apparent outright mismatch between prosody and syntax. Closer inspection suggests that the syntax might actually be quite in tune with prosody. In both cases, natural language employs strategies to construe complex meaning with list-like structures rather than nested ones. The privileged status of lists may be due to processing factors.
Pilar Prieto just posted the program of a workshop on prosodic development, to be held in Barcelona 16-Apr-2010 - 16-Apr-2010:
The main goal of this one-day workshop is to discuss different aspects of the children’s prosodic development in different languages. Discussions will address specific questions regarding the influence of language-specific distributional and frequency properties on language development and also the influence of general production and perception constraints. One of the goals will be to try to bridge the gap between perception and production studies in prosodic development.
The call for papers for Mosaic 2 has been posted. Mosaic is a workshop bringing together semanticists active in Canada. It’s a satellite meeting of the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
