Integrating Contrastive Focus with Givenness and Topic-Comment: A hierarchical focus architecture of the Romanian Discourse-Prosody interface

Neculai Curteanu, Cecilia Bolea, Diana Trandabat
2011 2011 6th Conference on Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue (SpeD)  
Contrastivity-Allover Keynote: How truthful is the intuition that behind larger (discursive, clausal) or smaller (dislocated, marked phrase) structures stand actually covert, implicit contrastive operators whose intonational-prosodic behavior should be overtly revealed, together with their corresponding background? Abstract -This paper presents the following results: (a) On the basis of an extensive overview of the currently Information Structure (IS) theories, the first goal of our paper is to
more » ... update the IS terminology for the three important IS dimensions: ± Givenness, Background-Focus (also referred as Topic-Focus or Backgroud-Kontrast), and Topic-Comment (also Theme-Rheme). (b) We propose an intonational discourse-level hierarchy among the Contrastive Focus (First Occurrence Focus), Second Occurrence Focus, Informational (Discourse-New) Focus, and Deaccented (Discourse-Given) Focus, while the phonetic properties of the considered intonational inequalities remain to be statistically established and weighted through speech analysis for Romanian. (c) This discourse-level prosodic hierarchy is combined, in a separate and independent way, with the clauseand phrase-level intonational hierarchies driven by Sentence Accent Assignment Rules, Nuclear Stress Rule, and the more recently Sentence Break Assignment Rules. (d) Based on the intonational focus hierarchies at points (b) and (c) above, a new architecture for the Discourse-Prosody interface is outlined, aiming to replace the classical approaches of Topic-Focus and Theme-Rheme algorithms (which can provide only incomplete Information Structure) for prosody prediction of Romanian. (e) The notions of explicit and implicit contrastive focus are defined, and the meaningful relevance of the contrastive intonation for the Romanian finite-clauses is pointed out by significant percentages of the contrastivity phenomena on George Orwell's "1984" corpus. (f) Classes of examples illustrate and evaluate, for Romanian, the intonational-prosodic patterns of the contrastive and non-contrastive focus markers, categories, and domains.
doi:10.1109/sped.2011.5940745 dblp:conf/sped/CurteanuBT11 fatcat:migppzrzhffwtdktmhqcywlu5m