The form and function of extra-sentential elements

1. The form and function of extra-sentential elements Lluïsa Astruc-Aguilera Francis Nolan University of Cambridge

2. Extra-sentential elements: • vocatives • ‘Your meal is ready, Mary’ • appositions • ‘This is John, my brother’ • epithets • ‘He’s won the lottery, the lucky bastard’ • direct speech markers • ‘“Your meal is ready”, I said to Anna’ • dislocations • ‘They’re crazy, those Romans’ • non-restrictive relative sentences • ‘Anna’s friends, who were loyal, supported her’ among others …

3. Intonational phrasing • ‘At present, the principles governing intonational phrasing are not well understood. Certain syntactic constructions – vocatives, appositions, parentheticals, preposed clauses, nonrestrictive relative clauses – are necessarily set off in separate IPs’. (Selkirk 1995: 567) (Pierrehumbert 1980, Bonet 1984, Nespor & Vogel 1986)

4. Research questions • Extra-sentential elements (ESEs) • What are their characteristics? • Do they constitute a homogeneous group? • Do they always form independent tonal units? • Are they accented or not?

5. Experimental design: 3 areas • General comparative study of the main type of ESEs in the two languages • Quantitative studies to find evidence that some ESEs are completely deaccented • Quantitative study to test the hypothesis that English and Catalan use different estrategies for marking ESEs prosodically

6. Objective • Estudying ESEs in English and Catalan • Languages with different degrees of syntactic and intonational flexibility • Catalan is more flexible syntactically • English is more flexible intonationally • If ESEs in English and Catalan show intonational differences • There would no support for the view that the prosodic form of ESEs follows from their syntactic form • 5 production experiments

7. Experiment 1 • General comparative study of the main types of ESEs in the two languages • Methodology: ESEs in different positions in the sentence, in sentences with identical meaning in English and Catalan: • ‘L’Anna va guanyar-la, Manu’ • ‘Anna won it, Manu’ • Corpus: 605 phrases, read by 12 people

8. Apposition: ‘John’ • Anna and her brother meet Alma and Anna says ‘This is my brother, John’ reduplication

9. Epithet: ‘the lucky bastard’ • ‘He’s won the lottery, the lucky bastard’ H* H* deaccenting

10. Results • Reduplication • at lower level • Deaccenting Appositions Non-restrictive relatives (English) epithets Dislocations Quotation markers (English) vocatives Sentential adverbs

11. Experiments 2, 3, 4 • Quantitative study • Objective: finding empirical support for the perceptual impression that most types of ESEs do not receive pitch accents • Methodology: • One language • One category of ESEs (right-dislocated phrases) • 2 different methods for uncovering potential pitch accents • Lombard speech • Changes in metrical prominence

12. Lombard speech • Reported 1911 by audiologist Etienne Lombard • Lombard discovered that applying an intense noise to a patient’s ear would cause the patient to speak louder • Speakers increase their voice level when the ambient noise increases • In noise, people speak louder • Auditory masking can be used to induce an increase in voice level • Expansion of pitch range

13. Right-dislocated phrases • Research question: are such constructions deaccented or do they receive very reduced pitch accents? • Masking noise: • 60 minutes of speech-shaped noise generated by computer • Covers the range of frequencies of human speech • More effective at lower volumes • Less dangerous • Task: • Reading aloud text (short dialogues) while hearing the masking noise

14. Right-dislocated phrases • Material: • 7 phrases with identical form but different meanings depending on intonation • ‘She saw Anna, the bride’ • Participants: 5 Central Catalan speakers • Method: • Noise through open-ear headphones • 4 levels of noise, from 0 to 4 • Increased at controlled intervals (70dB, 75dB, 80dB) • Corpus: • 112 phrases

15. 1 2 3 4 pitch level Results ‘Vol la vela, la vella’ (‘She wants the sail, the old lady’)

16. Dislocation Apposition

17. Results • Deaccentuation: 79% of the cases • Independent phrasing: 70% • Deaccentuation appears to be a more robust cue • At least with pre-planned, read speech • Observation: those speakers that read fast rely less on phrasing and more on deaccentuation • Interpreted as indication that phrasing and deaccentuation are strategies that complement each other

18. Lombard speech • Caused an increase in voice level rather than expansion of pitch range • Lombard speech is not entirely physiological • 4 speakers showed the Lombard Effect • 1 speaker, a teacher, said she wouldn’t speak loud because of a sore throat • Lombard speech is a communicative strategy • It only appears when an audience is present or evoked • It is a speaking style • Rephrasing: less pauses but longer, and on different locations • Changes in accentuation

19. Lombard speech: further work • Measuring pitch range of the rest of speakers • Further experiments • Monitoring loudness of response • Gradient or categorical? • Using masking noise for different frequencies

20. Experiment 3 • Highly controlled material regarding pragmatic context and experimental conditions • Clear-cut results • Corpus: 324 phrases, 18 phrases mixed with ‘distractors’, read by 6 Central Catalan speakers (3 males and 3 females) • Methodology: words with 3 degrees of prosodic prominence • Stress 0: Vilà • Stress 1: Vila • Stress 2: Vilamalla • Hypothesis: if syllables with a higher degree of prosodic prominence (stress 1) receive a higher fundamental frequency than those with secondary stress and no stress (stress 2 and 0), we can say that the former get a pitch accent

21. Results • Right-dislocated phrases form independent intonational phrases • They are nearly always deaccented • No statistically significant difference (ANOVA) between prominence levels l’hi a l’hi a

22. Experiment 4: sentential adverbs • Some disagreement about the syntactic characteristics of the other categories (especially vocatives and parenthesis) • But most grammar textbooks agree about sentential adverbs • Function: modifying the whole clause verb phrase-modifiers clause-modifiers ‘The car broke down, unfortunately’ ‘The car broke down suddenly’ semantic scope

23. Verb phrasal advs • manner adv • degree • frequency • duration • … • Agreement about syntactic function • Agreement about semantic function Sentential advs • domain (‘politically’) • modality (‘possibly’) • evaluation (‘fortunately’) • speech act related (‘frankly’) • connective (‘moreover’) ‘The seminar was a bore, frankly’ • ‘She spoke quite frankly’ (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language 2002, Hoye 1997, McCowley 1980)

24. Research questions • Independence of sentential adverbs from the main phrase: • Rhythmically independent, i.e. separated by pauses or lengthening? • Tonally independent, i.e. separated by tonal boundaries? • Accentuation: • Are they deaccented?

25. Methodology • Experimental material • Corpus: 760 phrases • 22 sentential adverbs • Phrases with sentential and manner adverbs in final position • Manner adverbs acting as control • Semantically equivalent in English and Catalan • Sounding natural

26. Oxford English Dictionary on-line as a searchable corpus • Pragmatic conditions kept constant (broad focus: new information, non-contrastive information) • The speakers • Recorded 16 speakers • Analyzed 10 • 5 Southern British English (Cambridge; 3 males, 2 females) • 5 Central Catalan (Reus; 3 males, 2 females)

27. Catalan and EnglishPrediction 1 • ‘Plastic’ languages (Dutch, English…) rely more on prosody to mark information status • ‘Non-plastic’ languages (Catalan, Spanish, Italian…) rely more on word order • Expected: Less deaccenting of sentential adverbs in Catalan than in English (Vallduvi 1994, 1996; Steedman 2000; Swerts, Krahmer & Avesani 2002)

28. Sentential and manner adverbsPrediction 2 • ‘I want to speak to you frankly’ (manner adv) • ‘I don’t agree with you, frankly’ (sentential adv) • They have different syntactic function and different semantic interpretation • Their semantic differences can be cued by intonation • Expected: Sentential and manner adverbs will receive different intonation patterns

29. Intonation of sentential and manner adverbs: English manner adv sentential ‘inevitably’

30. Intonation of sentential and manner adverbs: Catalan manner adverb sentential xò és el que ‘They live simply’ ‘And this is what happened, simply’

31. Results: Intonation 15% 50% > 1% 19%

32. Phrasing 6.6% 95% 15% 93%

33. ResultsPredictions 1 and 2 • YES: sentential adverbs behave differently from manner adverbs • YES: cross-linguistic differences • More deaccenting in English than in Catalan

34. Inter-speaker differences • Divergences in accentuation • Some speakers de-accent much more than the rest • Reading styles: careful vs. casual • Teachers • Homogeneity in phrasing across speakers, both in Catalan and English

35. Conclusions • English (‘plastic’ lang) relies more on prosody to mark information status than Catalan does (‘non-plastic’) Less deaccenting of sentential adverbs in Catalan than in English yes Indirect relation of syntax and prosody, via semantics. Some semantic diff are cued by intonation. Sentential and manner adverbs will receive different intonation patterns yes

36. Conclusions • ESEs are not a homogeneous group, neither syntactically nor prosodically • Only sentential adverbs form independent intonational phrases obligatorily • Sentential adverbs in Catalan and English show differences in frequency of accentuation • Interaction between prosodic form and syntactic function of ESEs to signal a specific communicative function • Existence of a level of information structure mediating between syntax and phonology

37. The form and function of extra-sentential elements Many thanks! Questions? www.astruc.info