0. Combinations of Sonority and Stress In their analysis of Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification, Prince and Smolensky (1993) postulate that different types of prominence, such as sonority and syllabicity, should align—a phenomenon they term prominence alignment. This concept is implemented by Prince and Smolensky using families of inherently-ranked constraints that are derived from combini...

The ability to convey our thoughts using an infinite number of linguistic expressions is one of the hallmarks of human language. Understanding the nature of the psychological mechanisms and representations that give rise to this unique productivity is a fundamental goal for the cognitive sciences. A long-standing hypothesis is that single words and rules form the basic building blocks of lingui...

This contribution examines the pragmatic approaches of definiteness in εmbɔsì language. The analysis reveals that εmbsì interacts with principles familiarity as regards second mention entity discourse, and identifiability hearer ability to uniquely identify entity. In addition, study shows contextual use definite description is subject different functions. It refers anaphora or situational refe...

The present study mainly investigates the interaction of syntaxmarked focus and wh-question induced focus on the formation of F0 patterns in Standard Chinese (Hereinafter, SC). Acoustic experiment demonstrates that the syntax-marked (lian or shi) focus can co-exist with the wh-question induced focus. The results are two folds: (i) the two kinds of focuses can add together to trigger more obviou...

Social media platforms such as Twitter is constantly transforming the usage of lexical items among global Internet users, including in Malaysia. Interestingly, despite adopting British English national education system, American gaining prominence Malaysians due to widespread dissemination through media. has been classified a hyper-central language, serving hub for Mair’s theory The World Syste...

The perception of prosodic prominence is known to be influenced by several distinct factors. In this study, we investigated the role of context, both global and local, in the prominence judgements of naı̈ve listeners. Monolingual English listeners marked where they heard prominence on pairs of twoword phrases (e.g. blue ball, green drum). Stimuli varied in whether or not the first phrase implied...

Control of prosody is essential for the synthesis of natural sounding speech. Text-to-speech systems tend to accent too many words when taking into account only the distinction between open-class and closed-class words. In the prominence-based approach [1], the degree of accentuation of a syllable is described in terms of a gradual prominence parameter. This paper presents the calculation of th...

Research in audiovisual prosody has shown that typically beat gestures are temporally integrated with prominent positions in speech (e.g., [1, 2]). There is independent evidence that both prosodic prominence (e.g., pitch accents) and gestural prominence associated with words (e.g., beat gestures) facilitate the recall of information (e.g., [3, 4, 5]). However, previous studies did not directly ...