This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as reve... more This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as revealed through a perceptual dialectology map task. On a map of the Arab world, female undergraduate students at Qatar University provided information about bound- aries where people speak differently and labels for those boundaries. A correlation analy- sis of the boundaries showed that participants viewed Arabic dialects as constituting five major dialect groups: the Maghreb, Egypt and Sudan, the Levant, the Gulf, and Soma- lia. A closer analysis of the content of the labels revealed variation in terms of principal (Goffman 1981) on whom they draw in their judgments, the latter being either individ- ual, regional (intermediate) or wide-scope generic. This analysis not only identifies more granularity in the concept of principal, it also quantifies the different kinds of principal and identifies statistical relationships between them, the labels, and the boundaries.
The meaningful contribution of terminal rising pitch has received a fair amount of scholarly atte... more The meaningful contribution of terminal rising pitch has received a fair amount of scholarly attention, discussed for its ability to create questioning force on declarative syntax (Gunlogson, 2008), as part of listing intonation (Ladd, 2008), as well as indicating discourse relationships ( Jasinskaja, 2010; Nilsenová, 2006; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). A common interpretation of the meaning of rising pitch is that it conveys incompleteness, more-to-come, continuation or is ‘forward-looking’ (Bolinger, 1989; Hirschberg, 2008; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). Recent experimental results contribute to this discussion, showing a rise can bias towards the coordinating interpretation of a coordination/subordination discourse ambiguity (Tyler, 2012). Because both interpretations of the ambiguity involve continuation, the rise is signaling not just that you continue but how you continue. In this paper, I will briefly present these results and then integrate them into a unified account of the contribution of rising pitch, which I see as a signal of incompleteness with respect to the current hierarchical level of the discourse.
While significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively littl... more While significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively little is known about prosody's effect on discourse interpretation. This paper explores the ability of synthetic manipulations of prosody to bias interpretation of discourse ambiguities where a first sentence is linked to two following sentences either by coordinating (Narration) or subordinating (Elaboration) discourse relations. In Experiment 1, manipulations of pitch, pause duration and intensity were found to influence discourse interpretation. In Experiment 2, subsets of these prosodic contrasts were compared. A bias for more coordination interpretations was found only for subsets with rising pitch at the end of the first sentence, including one where that was the only contrast, showing that rising pitch alone can disambiguate discourse. Participants also expressed more confidence when choosing a coordination interpretation after hearing a rise or a subordination interpretation after hearing a fall. Results demonstrate that the discourse disambiguation ability of prosody goes beyond ambiguities of scope and reference to hierarchical ambiguities of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations.Accepted Author Version. Not yet edited or proofed. Please see disclaimer on the article abstract page.
This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as reve... more This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as revealed through a perceptual dialectology map task. On a map of the Arab world, female undergraduate students at Qatar University provided information about bound- aries where people speak differently and labels for those boundaries. A correlation analy- sis of the boundaries showed that participants viewed Arabic dialects as constituting five major dialect groups: the Maghreb, Egypt and Sudan, the Levant, the Gulf, and Soma- lia. A closer analysis of the content of the labels revealed variation in terms of principal (Goffman 1981) on whom they draw in their judgments, the latter being either individ- ual, regional (intermediate) or wide-scope generic. This analysis not only identifies more granularity in the concept of principal, it also quantifies the different kinds of principal and identifies statistical relationships between them, the labels, and the boundaries.
The meaningful contribution of terminal rising pitch has received a fair amount of scholarly atte... more The meaningful contribution of terminal rising pitch has received a fair amount of scholarly attention, discussed for its ability to create questioning force on declarative syntax (Gunlogson, 2008), as part of listing intonation (Ladd, 2008), as well as indicating discourse relationships ( Jasinskaja, 2010; Nilsenová, 2006; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). A common interpretation of the meaning of rising pitch is that it conveys incompleteness, more-to-come, continuation or is ‘forward-looking’ (Bolinger, 1989; Hirschberg, 2008; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). Recent experimental results contribute to this discussion, showing a rise can bias towards the coordinating interpretation of a coordination/subordination discourse ambiguity (Tyler, 2012). Because both interpretations of the ambiguity involve continuation, the rise is signaling not just that you continue but how you continue. In this paper, I will briefly present these results and then integrate them into a unified account of the contribution of rising pitch, which I see as a signal of incompleteness with respect to the current hierarchical level of the discourse.
While significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively littl... more While significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively little is known about prosody's effect on discourse interpretation. This paper explores the ability of synthetic manipulations of prosody to bias interpretation of discourse ambiguities where a first sentence is linked to two following sentences either by coordinating (Narration) or subordinating (Elaboration) discourse relations. In Experiment 1, manipulations of pitch, pause duration and intensity were found to influence discourse interpretation. In Experiment 2, subsets of these prosodic contrasts were compared. A bias for more coordination interpretations was found only for subsets with rising pitch at the end of the first sentence, including one where that was the only contrast, showing that rising pitch alone can disambiguate discourse. Participants also expressed more confidence when choosing a coordination interpretation after hearing a rise or a subordination interpretation after hearing a fall. Results demonstrate that the discourse disambiguation ability of prosody goes beyond ambiguities of scope and reference to hierarchical ambiguities of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations.Accepted Author Version. Not yet edited or proofed. Please see disclaimer on the article abstract page.
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