Prosodic emphasis versus word order in Greek instructive texts

In Greek instructive texts, the production of clear and precise instructions is achieved by both prosodic modelling (Alexandris, Fotinea & Efthimiou, 2005) and morphosyntactic strategies (Alexandris, 2005). In the set of experiments performed in the present study, we attempt to determine whether prosodic modelling or whether morphosyntactic strategies, namely word order, constitutes the most crucial factor in the production of Greek spoken instructions most clearly and correctly understood by the receiver. In the present set of experiments, emphasis will be given in respect to utterances containing temporal expressions. The set of experiments performed in the present study involves the contrastive comparison and evaluation of 36 written and spoken utterances containing the temporal expressions, placed in different syntactic positions. Word order in technical manuals and prosodic emphasis in task-oriented dialog systems In the present study we attempt to determine whether the perceived prominence of elements in a sentence is primarily defined by prosody or by word order. The results of this experiment will contribute to the determination of whether prosodic modelling (1) or whether morphosyntactic strategies, namely word order (2), constitutes the most crucial factor in the production of Greek instructions most clearly and correctly understood by the receiver. The set of experiments performed will focus on utterances containing temporal expressions. Temporal and spatial expressions, as observed in recorded corpora of spoken Greek instructive texts, constitute the third largest group of elements receiving prosodic emphasis (after quantifiers and numerical expressions) and prosodic emphasis on temporal expressions is observed to produce a more precise and restrictive reading than when the same element in the same phrase is not emphasized (Alexandris, Fotinea & Efthimiou, 2005). In written Greek instructive texts such as technical manuals, usually involving a relatively high degree of Information Management (Hatim, 1997), ambiguities in respect to the semantics of spatial and temporal representation are solved with morphosyntactic strategies such as Rephrasing (Alexandris, 2005). Rephrasing is a controlled-language like approach (Lehrndorfer, 1996), where the key-word of the sentence, usually a negation, C. Alexandris and S.-E. Fotinea 66 a sublanguage-specific expression or a spatial and temporal expression, is positioned in the beginning of the sentence or phrase (Alexandris, 2005). Word order versus prosodic emphasis in temporal expressions