This chapter deals with the articulatory and acoustic correlates of contrastive focus in French, in children and adults. Ten speakers (three 4-year-old, three 8-year-old children, and four adult males and females) were recorded while producing repetitions of the [baba] sequence in two prosodic contexts: in neutral condition and under contrastive focus. The opening (from the consonant into the v...

Large templated factor graphs with complex structure that changes during inference have been shown to provide state-of-the-art experimental results on tasks such as identity uncertainty and information integration. However, learning parameters in these models is difficult because computing the gradients require expensive inference routines. In this paper we propose an online algorithm that inst...

Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral forDutch, and as contrastive forGerman. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance rea...

A visual world experiment examined the time course for pragmatic inferences derived from visual context and contrastive intonation contours. We used the construction It looks like an X pronounced with either (a) a H(*) pitch accent on the final noun and a low boundary tone, or (b) a contrastive L+H(*) pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support contrastive inference (e.g...

This paper investigates the systematic relatedness between the concessive –to (or mo)-marked polarity phenomenon and the high tone –nun (or wa)-marked Contrastive Topic phenomenon with respect to underlying concessivity and thereby derived scalarity. I also investigate the correlations between Contrastive Topic and PA conjunction (-ciman) on one hand and between Contrastive Focus and SN conjunc...

The starting point of this paper is the observation that in a question-answer dialog the use of but instead of and is obligatory if the answer is overinformative in that it includes an additional topic. A focus-semantic analysis of but is presented showing that (a) but is focus-sensitive and (b) but requires a denial with respect to the appropriate quaestio. This analysis provides a uniform bas...

0. Introduction Features which pattern as inert with respect to phonological processes are often unnecessary in distinguishing segments in an inventory. The relationship between phonological activity and contrastiveness has been modeled in theories of underspecification (e.g. Archangeli 1984, Steriade 1987). However, there is no consensus on how to determine which features are contrastive. The ...

Error Analysis is one of the major topics in the field of second language acquisition research. Errors are an integral part of language learning. The learner of English as a second language is unaware of the existence of the particular system or rule in English language. The learner’s errors have long been interested for second and foreign language researchers. The basic task of error analysis ...

In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework and a logical application for analyzing the semantics and pragmatics of contrastive conjunctions in natural language. It is shown how expressions like although, nevertheless, yet and but are semantically definable as connectives using an operator for implication in natural language and how similar pragmatic principles affect the behaviour of bo...