Dependencies over prosodic boundary tones in spontaneous spoken Hebrew
Vered Silber-Varod | The Research Center for Innovation in Learning Technologies, The Open University of Israel
The aim of the present study is to investigate two aspects of speech: suprasegmental characteristics and syntagmatic relations. More specifically, it focused on the segmentation role of prosody and its interface with the syntagmatic sequence. While certain prosodic boundary tones seem to break speech with correlation to syntactic phrasing, it was found that excessive elongated words are indeed prosodic breaks of various “strong” dependencies. Such a break is not due only to prosody or phonological rules, but can be attributed to the strength of syntagmatic relations (i.e. dependencies) between the elongated word and the word that precedes it, and between the elongated word and the following word. The findings suggest an encompassing approach to the prosody-syntax interface which says that through the elongated boundaries phenomenon, speakers and listeners are exposed to the tension between the prosodic strata and the syntactic strata of language, i.e. between a prosodic break and syntactic continuity. This tension occurs about 10%–18% of spontaneous Israeli Hebrew boundary tones.
References
Anderson, S.R
2005 Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. Oxford: OUP.
Anthony, L
2007 Antconc Version 3.2.1w. Center for English Language Education, Waseda University.
[URL]
Blanche-Benveniste, C
2007 Linguistic analysis of spoken language: The case of French language. In
Spoken Language Corpus and Linguistic Informatics: Contributions of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Computer Sciences,
Y. Kawaguchi,
S. Zaima &
T. Takagaki (eds). Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Brown, K.E. & Miller, J.E
(eds) 1996 Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. Oxford: Elsevier.
Carter, R. & McCarthy, M
2006 Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide: Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: CUP.
Chafe, W
1994 Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
CoSIH-
The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew.
[URL]
Danieli, M., Garrido, J.M., Moneglia, M., Panizza, A., Quazza, S. & Swert, M
2004 Evaluation of consensus on the annotation of prosodic breaks in the Romance corpus of spontaneous speech ‘C-ORAL-ROM’. In
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)
, 26–28. Lisboa.
Fraser, N.M
1996 Dependency grammar. In
Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories,
K.E. Brown &
J.E. Miller (eds), 71–75. Oxford: Pergamon.
Fraser, N.M., Corbett, G.G. & McGlashan, S
1993 Introduction. In
Heads in Grammatical Theory,
G.G. Corbett,
N.M. Fraser &
S. McGlashan (eds), 1–10. Cambridge: CUP.
Fox, A
2000 Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure: The Phonology of Suprasegmentals. Oxford: OUP.
Fox, B., Maschler, Y. & Uhmann, S
2006 A cross-linguistic study of self-repair in English, German, and Hebrew. Paper read at
ICCA 2006
, May 12, Helsinki.
Goldberg, Y
2011 Automatic Syntactic Processing of Modern Hebrew. Ph.D. dissertation, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva.
Goldberg, Y. & Elhadad, M
2010 Easy first dependency parsing of Modern Hebrew. In
Proceedings of the SPMRL-2010 – An NAACL/HLT workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages
, June 5, Los Angeles CA.
Hudson, R.A
1990 English Word Grammar. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.
Hudson, R.A
1993 Do we have heads in our minds? In
Heads in Grammatical Theory,
G.G. Corbett,
N.M. Fraser &
S. McGlashan (eds), 266–291. Cambridge: CUP.
Hudson, R.A
1996 Word grammar. In
Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories,
K.E. Brown &
J.E. Miller (eds), 368–372. Oxford: Pergamon.
Izre’el, S
2005 Intonation units and the structure of spontaneous spoken language: A view from Hebrew. Paper read at
IDP05 – International Symposium on ‘Towards modeling the relations between prosody and spontaneous spoken discourse’
, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Izre’el, S
2010 The basic unit of language: A view from spoken Israeli Hebrew. In
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Afroasiatic Languages, 55–89. Tsukuba, Ibaraki: Tsukuba University.
Izre’el, S. & Mettouchi, A
Forthcoming.
Representation of speech in CorpAfroAs: Transcriptional strategies and prosodic units. In
CorpAfroAs: The Corpus of AfroAsiatic Languages.
[URL]
Lacheret-Dujour, A
2007 Prosodie-discours: Une interface à muiltiples facettes.
Nouveaux Cahiers de Linguistique Française 28: 7–40.
Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR)
List of Standard Abbreviations [URL]
Mel’čuk, I.A
1988 Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. Albany NY: State University of New York Press.
Mertens, P
2011 Prosodie, syntaxe, discours: autour d’une approche predictive. In
Actes d’IDP 2009
; Septembre 2009,
H.-Y. Yoo &
E. Delais-Roussarie (eds), 19–32. Paris.
Rosén, H.B
1977 Contemporary Hebrew. The Hague: Mouton.
Rosta, A
2006 Structural and distributional heads. In:
Word Grammar: New Perspectives on a Theory of Language Structure,
K. Sugayama &
R.A. Hudson (eds), 171–200. London: Continuum.
SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet)
Schneider, G
1998 A Linguistic Comparison of Constituency, Dependency and Link Grammar. MA thesis, University of Zurich.
Selkirk, E
1995 The Prosodic Structure of Function Words.
[URL]
Silber-Varod, V
2010 Phonological aspects of hesitation disfluencies. In
Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010
, May 14–19, Chicago IL.
Silber-Varod, V
2011 The SpeeCHain Perspective: Prosodic-Syntactic Interface in Spontaneous Spoken Hebrew. Ph.D. dissertation, The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University.
Steedman, M
2001 Information structure and the syntax-phonology interface.
Linguistic Inquiry 31(4): 649–685.
Stern, N
1994 Dictionary of Hebrew Verbs: The Valence and Distribution of the Verb in Contemporary Hebrew. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press(in Hebrew).
Sugayama, K. & Hudson, R.A
(eds) 2006 Word Grammar: New Perspectives on a Theory of Language Structure. London: Continuum.
Tesnière, T
1959 Éléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris: Klincksieck.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Izre'el, Shlomo
2022.
The syntax of existential constructions.
Journal of Speech Sciences 11
► pp. e022001 ff.
Shor, Leon
2020.
Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew.
Linguistics 58:6
► pp. 1807 ff.
Silber-Varod, Vered, Mária Gósy & Anat Lerner
2021.
Is It a Filler or a Pause? A Quantitative Analysis of Filled Pauses in Hebrew. In
Speech and Computer [
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 12997],
► pp. 638 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.