Abstract
It is widely believed that syntactic and semantic ambiguities, such as the scope of negation and quantifiers, the association of focus sensitive operators, and the attachment of prepositional phrases, adverbials, and relative clauses can be disambiguated intonationally (Jackendoff, 1972;Bolinger, 1989;Renzi, 1988). While there has been some experimental investigation of the role prosody plays in influencing hearers’ interpretation of certain syntactic ambiguities in English (Altenberg, 1987;Beach, 1991;Price, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Fong, 1991, there has been little empirical study of these phenomena in other languages, and even less cross linguistic research. In this paper we present results of a study designed to compare the mechanisms speakers employ to disambiguate syntactically and semantically ambiguous utterances in English and Italian. We wanted to discover, first, whether phenomena believed to be intonationally disambiguable would be so disambiguated by naive subjects. Second, we wanted to see whether speakers of two languages in which prosodic features such as phrasing and pitch accent can be freely varied to convey differences in meaning would use those features similarly or not.
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References
Altenberg, B. 1987. Prosodic Patterns in Spoken English. Lund University Press.
Avesani, C, J. Hirschberg and P. Prieto. 1995. The intonational disambiguation of potentially ambiguous utterances in English, Italian, and Spanish. Proc. 13th ICPhS (Stockholm), vol. 1, 174–177.
Beach, C. 1991. The interpretation of prosodic patterns at points of syntactic structure ambiguity: Evidence for cue trading relations. Journal of Memory and Language 30, 644–663.
Bolinger, D.L. 1989. Intonation and Its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Jackendoff, R.S. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
Price, P.J., S. Shattuck-Hufnagel and C. Fong. 1991. The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90: 2956–2970.
Renzi, L. (ed.) 1988. Grande grammatica di consultazione (vol. 1). Bologna: II Mulino.
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Hirschberg, J., Avesani, C. (2000). Prosodic Disambiguation in English and Italian. In: Botinis, A. (eds) Intonation. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4317-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4317-2_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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