The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that specific prosodic features are systematically associated with modes of enunciation, and that such prosodic features are independent from the semio-syntactic structure of the sentence. Modes of enunciation correspond generally to sentence types: Assertive, Imperative, Interrogative and Affective (Brandt, 1971; 2008). Semio-syntactic s...

We study the impact of syntactic and shallow semantic information in automatic classification of questions and answers and answer re-ranking. We define (a) new tree structures based on shallow semantics encoded in Predicate Argument Structures (PASs) and (b) new kernel functions to exploit the representational power of such structures with Support Vector Machines. Our experiments suggest that s...

Broca’s agrammatic aphasia entails a syntactic deficit both in sentence comprehension and in sentence production. This chapter describes the intriguing pattern of deficits in speech production, and shows that this type of inquiry interacts with linguistic theory as well as with knowledge about brain-language relations. The syntactic tree, a syntactic construct that has originally been suggested...

A computer simulation model of the human speaker is presented which generates sentences in a piecemeal way. The module responsible for Grammatical Encoding (the tactical component) is discussed in detail. Generation is conceptually and lexically guided and may proceed from the bottom of the syntactic structure upwards as well as from the top downwards. The construction of syntactic structures i...

The syntactic component of a speech understanding system is described. The interface between acoustic recognition and syntax is sketched, and the set-up of the lexicon is outlined. The main aspects of the paper concern the ru/e format of the APSG (augmented phrase structure grammar), the syntactic concept for handling the sentence topology of German, and the treatment of discontinuous structure...

Pauses play important roles both for the intelligibility and the naturalness of speech. Their occurrences and durations in text reading are influenced by syntactic structures of the text as well as by physiological constraints of respiration on the part of the speaker. The present paper describes some of the preliminary findings on Japanese text reading, especially on the effects of the syntact...

A current trend in syntactic theory explores of the use of multiple dominance structures in the analysis of right-node raising and across-the-board movement, as well as in the formal description of movement. One effect of the introduction of multiple dominance structures is the complication of the mapping of syntactic structure to strings of terminals, as the multiply dominated element has synt...

This paper aims to highlight the fundamental elements of syntactic structure that underlies prosodic phrasing of utterances in Romanian. The present study investigates the relation betwen the syntactic structure of the text, especialy the noun phrases structure, and the prosodic hierarchy of the uttered text. The analysis covers aspects of prosodic phrasing for short and long noun phrases, with...

A concept can be linguistically expressed in various syntactic constructions. Such syntactic variations spoil the effectiveness of incorporating dependencies between words into information retrieval systems. This paper presents an information retrieval method for normalizing syntactic variations via predicate-argument structures. We conduct experiments on standard test collections and show the ...

Our paper comments on the divergences of the deep syntactic layers of Czech and English. We point out several phenomena potentially problematic for the syntactic alignment. We argue that at least some of the problems are caused by improper inferences from the deep syntactic layer of one language into the deep structures of the other one, and as such, they can be repaired on the theoretical level.