Three factors that have been argued to influence the prosody of an utterance are (i) which constituents encode discourse-salient information; (ii) which constituents are contrastive and evoke alternatives; and (iii) which constituents interact with the meaning of focus operators such as only (i.e., they ‘associate’ with focus). One challenge for a better understanding of the prosodic effects of...

Recent work on object shift in the Scandinavian languages has rejected earlier syntactic analyses in favor of prosodic or information-structural accounts. In this paper I present new evidence from Danish copular clauses that argues against a prosodic analysis of the phenomenon. In particular, I show that speci cational copular clauses do not allow object shift and that this fact cannot be accou...

We report a set of labelling criteria which have been developed to label prosodic events in clear, continuous speech, and propose a scheme whereby this information can be transcribed in a machine readable format. We have chosen to annotate prosody in a syllabic domain which is synchronised with a phonemic segmen-tation. A procedural deenition of syllables based on the grouping of phones is pres...

In this paper we discuss French prosody in the light of language contact. Data of three contact varieties of French are compared with two varieties spoken in monolingual contexts. The data are semi-automatically processed, and three prosodic features are analyzed: metrical weight of the Accentual Phrases (AP), respect of AP formation constraints, and realizations of sandhi phenomena. Rhythmic c...

An imitation experiment tests the hypothesis that when asked to reproduce a spontaneously-spoken utterance that they hear, speakers imitate the prosody of the stimulus in its phonological structure more accurately than the phonetic details. Results suggest that speakers rarely distort the presence of a pitch accent or an intonational phrase boundary, but more often change the nature of the phon...

An empirical crosscultural data analysis of a storytelling spectacle in Japan, rakugo, has been conducted to evaluate the role that the prosody plays in humour. It has been found that laughing effects depended on the interaction of prosodic features and dialectal markers as well as the audience’s reaction in storytellers' discourse. That is, the prosodic account to explain the humorous value of...

This paper presents a computer-assisted learning system of English prosody for French students. Our main goal is to provide learners with relevant feedback, based upon speech signal transformations and guided by a comparison between French and English prosodies. Considering that teachers should be given the possibility of customizing their courses, the main functions of WinSnoori for editing an...

A prosodic labeling support system has been developed. Large-scale prosodic databases are strongly desired for years, however, the construction of databases depend on hand labeling, because of the variety of prosody. We aim at not automating the whole labeling process, but making the hand labeling work more efficient by providing the labelers with the appropriate support information. The method...