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Overriding default interpretations through prosody: Depictive predicates in Brazilian Portuguese

Overriding default interpretations through prosody: Depictive predicates in Brazilian Portuguese. Nat ália Brambatti Guzzo Heather Goad McGill University 91 st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America Austin, TX – Jan 05-08 2017. Introduction.

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Overriding default interpretations through prosody: Depictive predicates in Brazilian Portuguese

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  1. Overriding default interpretations through prosody: Depictive predicates in Brazilian Portuguese Natália Brambatti Guzzo Heather Goad McGill University 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America Austin, TX – Jan 05-08 2017

  2. Introduction • Prosodic phrasing can help disambiguate ambiguous constructions (see e.g. Nespor & Vogel 1986) • Acoustic cues (e.g. pitch contours, pauses) can signal distinct prosodic phrasings and thus help disambiguate ambiguous constructions (see e.g. Fodor 2002; Jun 2003; Post 2003; Wagner 2010) • In the case of ambiguous constructions in which one of the possible interpretations is the default: • How do acoustic cues signaling prosodic boundaries help speakers override their default interpretation? Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  3. Introduction • In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), constructions with depictive predicates can be ambiguous if: (1) the subject and the object have the same gender (2) the attribute is non-stative O homemha procurou o cachorrolasonolentoha/la ‘The man looked for the dog sleepy’ Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  4. Introduction • Prosodic parsing mirrors different syntactic structures: O homem procurou [o cachorro sonolento]PPh O homem procurou [o cachorro]PPh[sonolento]PPh • But production can be the same (e.g. Magalhães & Maia 2006) Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  5. Introduction O homemha procurou o cachorrolasonolentoha/la ‘The man looked for the dog sleepy’ • Low attachment (LA): default interpretation for depictive predicates in BP (e.g. Magalhães & Maia 2006) • High attachment (HA) can be arrived at through context • Can it also be signaled through the use of acoustic cues? Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  6. Previous literature on depictive predicates in BP • Magalhães & Maia (2006) found a preference for low attachmentin Brazilian Portuguese, in a judgement task with orthographic stimuli O pai visitou o filho embriagado ‘The father visited the son drunk’ • Magalhães & Maia’s experiment: • Sentences presented on a computer screen, under the following conditions: (1) Break after the verb: O pai visitou / o filho embriagado (2) Break before the attribute: O pai visitou o filho / embriagado (3) No breaks, participants instructed to read sentences silently (4) No breaks, participants instructed to read sentences aloud • LA preferred even in condition (2) (60.42%; 81.25% in (1)) Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  7. Previous literature on depictive predicates in BP • When asked to disambiguate sentences orally, Magalhães & Maia’s participants used various cues to signal high attachment: • Pausebefore the attribute • Lengtheningof the stressed vowel in the attribute • Higher F0 in the attribute • But some participants did not use any cue at all • Prosody in sentences read aloud not always consistent with participants’ interpretations Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  8. Previous literature on depictive predicates in BP • Fonseca & Magalhães (2007): 4 participants from Magalhães & Maia’s (2006) experiment were asked to listen to their own readings and to judge whether the sentences had HA or LA • Mismatches between intended intonation and interpretation • The same participants were asked to record the sentences again and to disambiguate the sentences through their reading • These sentences were presented to 32 native speakers of BP • High variability in both the prosodic cues used and the interpretations arrived at Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  9. Previous literature on depictive predicates in BP • Santos & Leal (2010): • HA hypothesized to be more reliably signaled by greater duration of the syllable preceding the attribute and the initial syllable of the attribute O homem procurou o cachorro sonolento The man looked for the dog sleepy • Production study: target sentences included in paragraphs (unambiguous contexts) • Non-conclusive results: duration affected differently depending on target sentence and speaker Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  10. Previous literature on depictive predicates in BP • Three observations: (1) Low attachment is the default interpretation (2) LA is hard to overcome even when prosodic breaks are simulated (3) Variability in the use of prosodic cues for disambiguation and inconsistent interpretations/productions Questions: • Does this mean that prosody does not have a strong role in disambiguating ambiguous depictive predicates in BP? • I.e., do speakers rely (only/mostly) on context? • If prosody does play a role, how can we experimentally probe for it? Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  11. Our study • Two tasks: • Perceptual judgement task • Production task • Participants: • Native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (n = 23) Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  12. Perceptual Judgement Task • Pragmatically-neutral sentences presented auditorily O diretor olhou para o professor risonho ‘The principal looked at the teacher cheerful’ O empresário visitou o amigo ressentido ‘The businessman visited the friend resentful’ • Speakers had to choose whether the attribute referred to the subject (HA) or the object (LA) of the sentence Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  13. Perceptual Judgement Task • Stimuli: 12 target sentences, 20 fillers • Fillers with gender mismatch or obligatory LA (stative attributes) • Stimuli recorded by a male native speaker of BP with training in Linguistics • Stimuli (n = 224) constructed and manipulated in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2016) according to seven conditions • Stimuli divided equally across two versions of the experiment Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  14. Perceptual Judgement Task • Conditions: E.g.: O diretor olhou para o professor risonho ‘The principal looked at the teacher cheerful’ 1. Neutral (low F0 in attribute) 2. Pause after verb 3. Pause before attribute 4. Duration in attribute 5. High F0 in attribute 6. Pause bef. attr. + duration 7. Pause bef. attr. + high F0 Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  15. Perceptual Judgement Task Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  16. Perceptual Judgement Task: Predictions • Neutralcondition will favor LA (default interpretation) • Pauses will be good predictors: • Pause after verb: LA • Pause before attribute: HA • Durationand High F0in the attribute will yield higher rates of HA • Cue combination will yield the highest rates of HA Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  17. Perceptual Judgement Task: Results • Multilevel logistic regressions in R (R Core Team, 2016) • By-speaker and by-item random intercepts Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  18. Production Task • Participants were orthographically presented with paragraphs that provided a context • Each paragraph was followed by a sentence containing a depictive predicate • 20 test sentences (target items n = 10) • Fillers containing gender mismatch or obligatory LA (stative predicate) Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  19. Production Task • Measurements: • Duration of boundary between the object and the attribute (2 syllables) • Duration of stressed vowel in the attribute • Duration of final vowel in the object • Peak F0 in the subject/object/attribute • F0 at the right edge of the object • Mean F0 and F0 at the midpoint of the stressed vowel in the subject/object/attribute Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  20. Production Task: Predictions • LA: no use of any particular cue (i.e., profile of declarative sentence) • HA: • Manipulation of F0 in the subject and the attribute • Pause before the attribute • Lengthening before the pause Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  21. Production Task: Results • LA: declarative intonation (no specific acoustic cue) A vendedora encontrou a diretora nervosa ‘The saleswoman found the director nervous’ Speaker 07 Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  22. Production Task: Results • HA: Use of pause before the attribute 1) Pause + lengthening of final V in the object A médica cumprimentou a enfermeira nervosa ‘The doctor greeted the nurse nervous’ Speaker 08 Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  23. Production Task: Results • HA: Use of pause before the attribute 2) Pause + rise in F0 at the right edge of the object A médica cumprimentou a enfermeira nervosa ‘The doctor greeted the nurse nervous’ Speaker 09 Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  24. Production Task: Results • HA: disambiguation through context only • No particular cue (declarative intonation) A médica cumprimentou a enfermeira nervosa ‘The doctor greeted the nurse nervous’ Speaker 07 Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  25. Summary of Results • Perceptual judgement task: • LA favored by neutral intonation, pause after verb and duration in attribute • HA favored by pause before attribute and pause + F0/duration • High F0 in attribute is significantly different from all other conditions • Production task: • No particular cue for LA • HA signaled through pause before the attribute (combined with rise in F0 or lengthening at the right edge of the object) • Some speakers do not differentiate between LA and HA in their productions Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  26. Final Remarks • Prosody has a role in disambiguating sentences with ambiguous depictive predicates in Brazilian Portuguese • Speakers notice the role of pause before the attribute in overriding the default preference for LA (in both tasks) • In the speakers’ judgements, pause before the attribute is enough to signal HA (combination of cues is not necessary) • In the speakers’ productions, pause is combined with other cues (duration or F0) Guzzo & Goad 2017 | Ambiguous predicates in Portuguese

  27. References Boersma, P. & D. Weenink. (2016). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.19. Fodor, J. D. (2002). Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In M. Hirotani (ed.), Proceedings of NELS 32, pp. 113-132. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA. Fonseca, A. A. & J. O. de Magalhães. (2007). A interpretação de pistas prosódicas na aposição de atributos em sentenças ambíguas do PB. Estudos da Linguagem 15: 187-206. Magalhães, J. O. de & M. Maia. (2006). Pistas prosódicas implícitas na resolução de ambiguidades sintáticas: um caso de adjunção de atributos. Revista da ABRALIN 5: 143-167. Nespor, M. &Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris. Post, B. (2003). French phrasing and accentuation in different speaking styles. In Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics 8: 69-83. R Development Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria. Santos, R. S. & Leal, E. G. (2010). Os domínios prosódicos e a duração de sílabas no portuguêsbrasileiro (Prosodic domains and syllable duration in Brazilian Portuguese). Estudos da Língua(gem) 8: 133-171. Wagner, M. (2010). Prosody and recursion in coordinate structures and beyond. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28(1): 183-237.

  28. Thank you! nataliaguzzo@me.com http://www.nataliaguzzo.wordpress.com heather.goad@mcgill.ca http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~heather.goad/

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