Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Commentary on Elfner's Strong Start and phonological phrasing in Irish

krisyu
July 29, 2016

Commentary on Elfner's Strong Start and phonological phrasing in Irish

Commentary on Emily Elfner's talk at Workshop “The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology”, 07/29/16 - 07/31/16, UMass Amherst. See https://gsellblog.wordpress.com/program/

krisyu

July 29, 2016
Tweet

More Decks by krisyu

Other Decks in Research

Transcript

  1. COMMENTARY ON ELFNER’S STRONG START AND PHONOLOGICAL PHRASING IN IRISH

    KRISTINE YU, UMASS AMHERST JULY 29, 2016 Workshop: the effects of constituency on sentence phonology
  2. IRISH SYNTAX PHONOLOGY ? 3 McCloskey 1996, 2011 Ito &

    Mester 2007 et seq., Elfner 2012, 2015
  3. IRISH SYNTAX PHONOLOGY ? 4 McCloskey 1996, 2011 Ito &

    Mester 2007 et seq., Elfner 2012, 2015
  4. IRISH SYNTAX PHONOLOGY ? 4 McCloskey 1996, 2011 Ito &

    Mester 2007 et seq., Elfner 2012, 2015 MATCH Selkirk 2011
  5. 5 MATCH Selkirk 2011 We could define tonal placement in

    the spellout rules of syntactic structures.
  6. PHONOLOGICAL CONSTITUENCY TESTS? 6 Syntactic constituency tests do not depend

    on phonology. Phonological constituency tests should not depend on syntax.
  7. PHONOLOGICAL CONSTITUENCY TESTS? ▸ Distribution of tonal events ▸ Lengthening,

    strengthening ▸ Domain-sensitive segmental, tonal processes ▸ “Global” pitch range changes ▸ Sensitivity to speech rate ▸ “Missing” tonal events underlyingly present? Phonetic realization? Allophonic realization? 8 Other evidence besides tonal events! (Bennett 2015)
  8. PHONOLOGICAL CONSTITUENCY TESTS? 9 What might we do going forward?

    More attention to phonetic data Preservation and distribution of recordings
  9. While not all recordings provide equally clear F0 contours, it

    is assumed that the patterns discussed in this paper are in some sense the ``default'' pattern…there are many possible explanations for deviations from what is proposed to be the dominant pattern including, among other things, inter- and intra- speaker variation in phrasing patterns and disfluencies or unnaturalness due to laboratory context in which the recordings were produced. Elfner (2013, p. 1172-3) 10 ABSTRACTING AWAY FROM VARIABILITY AS A FIRST STEP
  10. While not all recordings provide equally clear F0 contours, it

    is assumed that the patterns discussed in this paper are in some sense the ``default'' pattern…there are many possible explanations for deviations from what is proposed to be the dominant pattern including, among other things, inter- and intra- speaker variation in phrasing patterns and disfluencies or unnaturalness due to laboratory context in which the recordings were produced. Elfner (2013, p. 1172-3) 10 ABSTRACTING AWAY FROM VARIABILITY AS A FIRST STEP CARVING NATURE AT ITS JOINTS (Plato 360 B.C.E., Phaedrus 265E)
  11. It happens that none of the papers contained in this

    issue suggest the existence of constituents of prosodic structure that fail to correspond to appropriate constituents of syntactic structure… further variation in the syntactic and phonological properties of the sentences investigated in these languages, or the conditions under which they are produced, [c]ould show the effects of prosodic markedness constraints or other factors which do lead to non-isomorphisms… Selkirk and Lee (2015, p. 5-6) 11 WHERE ARE THE SYNTAX-PROSODY MISMATCHES?
  12. 12

  13. 16 What has appeared variable is sometimes later found to

    be a regular consequence of a previously unrecognized factor.
  14. POTENTIALLY UNRECOGNIZED FACTORS ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a

    consequence of variability in syntactic structures (Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005, Hirsch and Wagner 2015, Ahn 2015) ▸ Extraposition of object? [[VS]O] ▸ Different choices for spellout units (also, therefore no mismatch)? 17
  15. POTENTIALLY UNRECOGNIZED FACTORS ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a

    consequence of variability in syntactic structures (Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005, Hirsch and Wagner 2015, Ahn 2015) ▸ Extraposition of object? [[VS]O] ▸ Different choices for spellout units (also, therefore no mismatch)? ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in speaker’s imposed discourse contexts under “all-new” conditions (check for order effects?) 17
  16. POTENTIALLY UNRECOGNIZED FACTORS ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a

    consequence of variability in syntactic structures (Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005, Hirsch and Wagner 2015, Ahn 2015) ▸ Extraposition of object? [[VS]O] ▸ Different choices for spellout units (also, therefore no mismatch)? ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in speaker’s imposed discourse contexts under “all-new” conditions (check for order effects?) ▸ Relation between tonal events and boundaries and prominence 17