Sentence Stress

A  typical  English  utterance  is  marked  with  a  sentence  stress,  that
is,  a  prominence  on  one  word  or  syllable  that  is  greater  than  other  lexical
stresses  in  the  clause  or  utterance.  This  stress  consists  of  a  pitch  prominence
that  demarcates  the  intonational  phrase.  An  Optimality  Theory  analysis  of
sentence  stress  is  presented  here,  which  integrates  insights  from  the  generative
and  applied  linguistic  approaches  under  one  framework.  Sentence  stress  is
explained  in  terms  of  the  interactions  between  prosodic  structure,  stress,
syntax,  and  information  structure,  that  is,  stress  assignment  on  the  main  focus
or  most  prominent  information.  The  constraints  and  constraint  interactions  can
explain  some  non-canonical  stress  types  that  are  not  handled  so  well  by
traditional  generative  approaches,  and  also  address  some  stress  patterns  and
linguistic  structures  that  functional  accounts  do  not  address.  The  Optimality
framework  can  explain  this  interface  of  different  linguistic  domains,  and  this
interface  can  better  explain  the  behavior  of  English  sentence  stress.

Theories of Focus Projection claim that a single pitch accent on a verb’s argument is sufficient to prosodically mark that verb as part of the focus, negating the need for a prenuclear accent on the verb itself. The present study employed on-line lexical processing to test this claim empirically. In three cross-modal associative priming experiments, listeners heard English SVO sentences with/without prenuclear accenting on the verb in both broad (VP) and narrow (object) focus contexts. Results showed that the absence of a prenuclear accent in broad focus contexts did not significantly disrupt priming, but the presence of one in narrow focus contexts did. This disruption was found to be somewhat modulated by individual differences in “autistic traits”. Overall, the findings are interpreted as supporting a model that includes both (a) a Focus Projection mechanism and (b) an information structural function for prenuclear accents, with the latter possibly subject to systematic cross-listener variation.

This study investigates factors that influence the interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing the word only. When only appears preverbally in simple SVO constructions, it can be interpreted as associating with the direct object, the verb, or the entire verb phrase. An auditory sentence completion task was used to probe native-speaking English listeners for overall biases in the interpretation of only, as well as for the influence of accentuation and individual differences on the extent of any such biases. Results show a strong preference for only to associate with the direct object overall, although this preference is reduced when the direct object is less (relatively) prominent. Finally, the effect of accentuation was itself modulated by individual differences related to cognitive processing style.

The book addresses the problem of the relation between sentence stress placement and word order in English and Polish in view of 'definiteness' in both languages, with articles in English and their absence in Polish. Those phenomena are analysed in various syntactic structures (affirmative, negative and questions taking into account the fact that English is a fixed word order language, and Polish grammatically free word order language. One of the tentative conclusions is that sentence stress in neutral intonation depends on the contextual information value of nouns. Contextually new nouns are necessarily stressed, while "definite", contextually given  nouns must not be stressed. In the latter situation, the stress falls on any other category following the 'end-focus' principle.

The starting point of this article is the question "How to retrieve fingerprints of rhythm in written texts?" We address this problem in the case of Brazilian and European Portuguese. These two dialects of Modern Portuguese share the same lexicon and most of the sentences they produce are superficially identical. Yet they are conjectured, on linguistic grounds, to implement different rhythms. We show that this linguistic question can be formulated as a problem of model selection in the class of variable length Markov chains. To carry on this approach, we compare texts from European and Brazilian Portuguese. These texts are previously encoded according to some basic rhythmic features of the sentences which can be automatically retrieved. This is an entirely new approach from the linguistic point of view. Our statistical contribution is the introduction of the smallest maximizer criterion which is a constant free procedure for model selection. As a by-product, this provides a solution for the problem of optimal choice of the penalty constant when using the BIC to select a variable length Markov chain. Besides proving the consistency of the smallest maximizer criterion when the sample size diverges, we also make a simulation study comparing our approach with both the standard BIC selection and the Peres-Shields order estimation. Applied to the linguistic sample constituted for our case study, the smallest maximizer criterion assigns different context-tree models to the two dialects of Portuguese. The features of the selected models are compatible with current conjectures discussed in the linguistic literature.