The present article describes a corpus which was collected for the cross-language comparison of prominence. In the data analysis, the acoustic-phonetic properties of words spoken with two different levels of accentuation (de-accented and nuclear accented in non-contrastive narrow-focus) are examined in question-answer elicited sentences and iterative imitations (on the syllable ‘da’) produced b...

Abstract The primary aim of this study was to investigate prosodic prominence across three groups Sylheti-English bilinguals: first-generation who arrived as adults, children, and second-generation, i.e., born in the United Kingdom parents grew up Bangladesh. To measure prominence, f 0, duration, intensity were measured disyllabic words Sylheti English. results showed significant differences f0...

Robots interacting with humans need to understand actions and make use of language in social interactions. Research on infant development has shown that language helps the learner to structure visual observations of action. This acoustic information typically in the form of narration overlaps with action sequences and provides infants with a bottom-up guide to find structure within them. This c...

Languages vary in the ways in which they express various notions of discourse prominence, such as topic, focus, and point of view. In the Algonquian language family, such notions are grammaticalized via two morphosyntactic mechanisms: obviation and direct/inverse. Obviation and direct/inverse are typically conceived of as working together as a single concerted system, both marking the same type...

In this paper, the system of language and architecture has been studied in three levels of elemental, structural and semantic in cases of traditional and modern mosques in Iran through the method of analyzing the content of texts and in a conceptual model. Then, in a comparative method, the common patterns of these systems have been explained at all three levels. The common features at the elem...

This article attempts to see, through the structural significances of poetic language, the nature of the split between linguistic description and literary interpretation. Rhythm is the most prominent means of relating form to content in poetic language. The first account of this prominence is seen through identifying its position in the two prosodic forms of metrical and non-metrical poetry. Fo...

It is well-known that Chinese has SVO as predominant word order, with variant orders OSV and SOV marking topic and focus, intimately linked to the topic-prominence of the language. Assuming early setting of the head parameter in syntactic acquisition and the peripheral positions of topic and focus in clausal structure, one might hypothesize that Chinese-speaking children will acquire the predom...

0. Introduction This paper argues for the significance of argument structure and linear order in the binding conditions of Balinese (an Austronesian language with about 3,000,000 speakers, primarily on the islands of Bali and western Lombok, Indonesia). Our analysis employs the theory of prominence due to Bresnan (1995a,b). We show that linear order, thematic prominence, and the term/oblique di...

Focus is central to our control of information flow in dialogue. Spoken language understanding systems therefore need to be able to detect focus automatically. It is well known that prominence is a key marker of focus in English, however, the relationship is not straight-forward. We present focus prediction models built using the NXT Switchboard corpus. We claim that a focus is more likely if a...