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Yudith Putrigajevsky (BS A) 1012150028

PROSODY
Prosody describes the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. This often coincides with important syntactic boundaries. However, it also carries additional information about emotions of a speaker or the use of satire. Prosody, as expressed in pitch, gives clues to many channels of linguistic and Para-linguistic information. Linguistic functions such as stress and tone tend to be expressed as local excursions of pitch movement. Intonation types and Para-linguistic functions may affect the global pitch setting, in addition to characteristic local pitch excursion near the edge of the sentence (i.e. boundary tones). The combinations of multichannel signals present a challenge to prosody modeling, which we will return to in Section 3.

Prosody used to convey lexical meaning: Stress, accentual and tone languages. o Stress: English is an example of a stress language. Stress location is part of the lexical entry of each English word. For example, "apple" and "orange" both have stress on the first syllable, while "banana" has stress on the second syllable. When an English word is spoken in isolation in declarative intonation, f0 typically peaks on the stressed syllable. o Accentual language: Japanese is an example of an accentual language. A word is lexically marked as accented (on a particular syllable) or un-accented. A simplified description is that pitch rises near the beginning of an accentual phrase and falls on the accented syllable. For detailed analysis, see Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1988). o Tone language: Mandarin Chinese is an example of a lexical tone language. Each syllable is lexically marked with one of the four lexical tones (and occasionally, with a fifth, neutral tone). Tones have distinctive pitch contours. Altering the pitch contour may have the consequence of changing the lexical meaning of a word, and perhaps the meaning of a sentence.

Prosody used to convey non-lexical information: Intonation type (Question vs. declarative sentences). Languages may employ prosody in different ways to differentiate declarative sentences from questions. A general trend is that questions are associated with higher pitch somewhere in the sentence, most commonly near the end. This may be manifested as a final rising contour, or

SEMANTICS - Assignment 2B

higher/expanded pitch range near the end of the sentence. In English, declarative intonation is marked by a falling ending while yes-no question intonation is marked by a rising one, as shown on the last digit "one" in the English examples. Russian question, on the other hand, uses strong emphasis on a key word instead of a rising tail. Chinese questions are manifested by an expanded pitch range near the end of the sentences; however, the speaker preserves the lexical tone shapes (Yuan, Shih, Kochanski 2002). Examples of declarative and question intonation in English, Russian, and Chinese.

Prosody used to convey discourse functions: Focus, prominence, discourse segments, etc. Topic initialization is typically associated with high pitch (Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert, 1986; Sluijter and Terken, 1993). Pitch is typically raised in the discourse initial section and lowered in the discourse final section. Also, new information in the discourse structure is typically accented while old information de-accented.

Prosody used to convey emotion. Most experiments studying emotional speech study stylized emotion, as delivered by actors and actresses. In these acted-out emotions, a few categories of emotions can be reliably identified by listeners, and one can find consistent acoustic correlates of these categories. For example, excitement is expressed by high pitch and fast speed, while sadness is expressed by low pitch and slow speed. Hot anger is characterized by over-articulation, fast, downward pitch movement, and overall elevated pitch. Cold anger shares many attributes with hot anger, but the pitch range is set lower. The study of emotion in natural speech is a lot more complicated. It is generally recognized that speakers show mixed feelings and ambiguous states of mind, and the emotions do not fall into clear cut categories. o Emotion experiment stimuli o Couldn't you walk home alone, Uncle Oliver? o Shall I take my gun, or fishing rod? o Marilyn won nine million dollars o Dirty rats are the best, aren't they?

Prosody tied to the physical system: declination. There is a tendency for pitch to decline during the course of an utterance ('t Hart and Cohen, 1973; Maeda, 1976). This effect is at least partially caused by the drop of sub-glottal pressure (Lieberman, 1967; Fujisaki, 1983; Strik and Boves, 1995). Listeners compensate for this effect: When

SEMANTICS - Assignment 2B

presented with two accented words of equal pitch height, listeners judge the second one to be more prominent (Pierrehumbert 1979). Below is an example of Mandarin Chinese (Shih, 2000) showing the pitch declination profile in a sequence of high level tones, which are marked as "H" in the figure. The pitch drops about 50 Hz from the highest "H" to the final

"H". Types of prosody: 1. Statement Vs Question (fall vs rise) Example: Yes. Yes? This is the place. This is the place? 2. Information Sought Vs Repetition Requested (fall vs rise) Example: When? Where? When? Where? 3. Parallel Structure Vs Antithesis (fall vs fall and rise) Example: This is my sister, Ellen. This is my sister, Ellen. 4. Open Question Vs Alternative Question (rise vs rise, fall) Example: Do you have a pencil or a pen? Do you have a pencil or a pen? 5. Full Statement Vs Reservation (fall vs fall-rise) Example:

SEMANTICS - Assignment 2B

Thats true. (or Thats true.) Thats true.

SEMANTICS - Assignment 2B

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