Appositive Relative Clauses and their Prosodic Realization in Spoken Discourse: a Corpus Study of Phonetic Aspects in British English

1
Appositive Relative Clauses and their Prosodic
Realization in Spoken Discourse a Corpus Study
of Phonetic Aspects in British English

• Cyril Auran Rudy Loock
• Laboratoire Savoirs, Textes, Langage
• Université Lille III CNRS UMR 8163

2
Introduction

• Global project
• relate discourse structure/functions prosody
• one specific syntactic structure Appositive
  Relative Clauses (ARCs)
• differences in pragmatic functions gt differences
  in morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics,
  and in phonetic/phonological differences

3
Methodology

• 2 spoken British English corpora
• Aix-MARSEC (cf. Auran, Bouzon Hirst 2004)
• BBC recordings from the 1980s
• 53 different speakers
• 5h30 of natural sounding but scripted English
• ICE-GB (cf. Greenbaum 1996)
• 1,000,000 words of written spoken English
  from the 1990s
• Unscripted, spontaneous English sub-corpus
• Audio files unavailable for the present study

4
Methodology

• Prosodic marking of elements within Loocks
  (2003, 2005, 2006) taxonomy of ARCs depending on
  their discourse functions
• Discourse annotation discourse function,
  information status of ARC and MC, syntactic
  characteristics
• Prosodic annotation semi-automatic analysis of
  the corresponding recordings using original
  scripts with Praat
• Todays paper preliminary results and
  tendencies concerning prosodic characteristics of
  2 types of ARCs within Loocks taxonomy

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1. Appositive Relative Clauses and their
Functions in Discourse

• Positive definition of ARCs (see (1a) vs.
  Determinative Relative Clauses (1b)) in terms of
  discourse functions
• (1) a. The people of Oz, who were scared of the
  Witch of the East, were relieved when Dorothys
  porch crushed her to death. (ARC)
• b. The people of Oz who were scared of the
  Witch of the East were relieved when Dorothys
  porch crushed her to death. (DRC)
• 3 main categories (see diagram in Proceedings
  p.20, Fig.1)
• Relevance ARCs
• Subjectivity ARCs
• Continuative ARCs

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1. Appositive Relative Clauses and their
Functions in Discourse

• Relevance ARCs
• The speaker needs to convey information known by
  some of her/his addresees only need for a
  compromise to optimize the relevance of the
  antecedent and/or the subject-predicate relation
  within the MC for no gratuitous effort (see
  Sperber Wilson)
• (2) a. he was convinced the battle for the
  hearts and minds of the people was being won
  especially among the Ovambo who form the
  majority of SWAPO's support
• b. normally visitors to the state department
  require credentials and even then they have
  to pass through metal detectors but twenty year
  old Edward Steven Doster managed to evade the
  security arrangements and carry a collapsible
  rifle inside and up to the seventh floor
  where the secretary of state has his offices

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1. Appositive Relative Clauses and their
Functions in Discourse

• Subjectivity ARCs
• The speaker needs to convey information that
  represents a comment, a judgement, or an
  assessment, by themselves or somebody else.
• The ARC establishes a discrepancy with the
  discourse topic (referential vs. interpretative
  level).
• (3) a. Israelis have sympathy and liking for
  Americans which is just as well since the
  country is swarming with transatlantic visitors
• b. most of them were made of nylon and
  imported which I found very very strange

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1. Appositive Relative Clauses and their
Functions in Discourse

• Continuative ARCs
• Already defined by Jespersen (1970) and
  Cornilescu (1981) among others but definitions
  not interchangeable
• Narrate an event successive to a first event (MC)
  make narrative time move forward with a
  possible causality link.
• (4) a. northern Scotland will have occasional
  light rain which will be followed during the day
  by colder but still mainly cloudy weather with
  a few sleet and snow showers
• b. the first book he took from the library was
  Darwin's Origin of Species which inspired him
  with the dream of becoming a geologist
• /

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1. Appositive Relative Clauses and their
Functions in Discourse

• Hierarchisation of the informational contents
  (ARCMC) different from other categories
• narrative dynamism traditionally restricted to
  independent clauses (Depraetere 1996),
  informational contents on the same level
• Are continuatives independent clauses?
• (cf. Ross 1967, Emonds 1979, McCawley 1982, Fabb
  1990 among others), who express this idea for
  ARCs as a whole.
• gt Prosodic investigation are ARCS realized
  with the intonation contour of an independent or
  subordinate clause?

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2. Prosodic analysis Fundamental prosodic
conceptions

• Di Cristos (2000) conception of prosody as a
  macro-system
• 4 interrelated but independently analysable
  acoustically rooted systems (Auran 2004)
• Tonal aspects
• Temporal aspects
• Intensity
• Voice quality

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2. Prosodic analysis Prosodic representations
Original F0 Resynthesized F0 (MOMEL)
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2. Prosodic analysis Prosodic dimensions

• 2 types of dimensions within prosodic systems
• linear succession of F0 ups and downs (or
  intensity)
• orthogonal dimensions (level and span cf.
  Ladd 1996)

Differences in levels
Differences in spans
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2. Prosodic analysis Data extractions

• Discourse annotation
• 50 ARCs
• 33 Relevance
• 8 Subjectivity
• 1 Continuative
• 4 Relevance/Subjectivity
• 2 Ambiguous continuative
• 2 Unidentified
• 5 discourse parameters
• ARC type
• Position (initial/medial/final)
• Information status of antecedent
• Information status of ARC
• Phrastic status of antecedent

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2. Prosodic analysis Data extractions

• Prosodic annotation 48 parameters
• Tonal system (32) ARC mean F0 (Htz semitones
  or ST), ARC minimum F0 (Htz ST), ARC maximum F0
  (Htz ST), ARC register span (Htz ST), ARC
  onset (Htz ST), ARC offset (Htz ST), previous
  IU mean F0 (Htz ST), previous IU minimum F0
  (Htz ST), previous IU maximum F0 (Htz ST),
  previous IU register span (Htz ST), previous IU
  offset (Htz ST), next IU mean F0 (Htz ST),
  next IU minimum F0 (Htz ST), next IU maximum F0
  (Htz ST), next IU register span (Htz ST),
  next IU onset (Htz ST), difference between
  previous IU offset and ARC onset (ST), difference
  between ARC offset and next IU onset (ST)
• Temporal system (10) ARC duration (raw and
  normalised), previous IU duration (raw and
  normalised), next IU duration (raw and
  normalised), difference between previous IU
  normalised duration and ARC normalised duration,
  difference between ARC normalised duration and
  next IU normalised duration, silence duration
  before ARC, silence duration after ARC
• Intensity system (6) mean of ARC global
  intensity, standard deviation of ARC global
  intensity, mean of previous IU global intensity,
  standard deviation of previous IU global
  intensity, mean of next IU global intensity,
  standard deviation of next IU global intensity
• 53 observations per ARC

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3. Results ARCs as a whole

• Tonal aspects
• Register level in ARCs (-0.61 ST) significantly
  lower than in preceding (0.21 ST) and following
  (0.09 ST) IUs
• typical of parentheticals (Wichmann 2000)
• But
• Register span in ARCs not significantly
  different from preceding and following IUs
• Onset differential displays unusual positive
  value (mean 2.24 ST), commonly associated with
  discourse discontinuity
• atypical of parentheticals

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3. Results ARCs as a whole

• Temporal aspects
• No significant difference in speeh rates between
  ARCs and preceding/following IUs
• Intensity
• No significant differences between ARCs and
  preceding/following IUs
• gt Complex interplay of production and
  interpretation constraints ARCs show
  characteristics both traditional to and atypical
  of parentheticals

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3. Results Differences between types of ARCs

• ! Results presented here reflect but tendencies
  need for formal statistical testing
• But results seem to indicate prosodic
  differences that can be interpreted as
  differences in discourse functions.
• In particular, results seem to indicate stronger
  discourse discontinuity for subjectivity ARCs.

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3. Results Differences between types of ARCs

• Similar register levels and spans

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3. Results Differences between types of ARCs

• Higher onset value for subjectivity ARCs

• relevance 1.80ST
• subjectivity2.23ST

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3. Results Differences between types of ARCs

• Similar intensity span values
• Lower intensity level values for subjectivity
  ARCs (59.78 dB vs. 61.04 dB)

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3. Results Differences between types of ARCs

• Speech rate
• Relevance -0.178
• Subjectivity -0.043

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4. Discussion

• Surprisingly atypical characteristics of ARCs as
  a whole seem to go along with a syntactic
  behaviour and a semantic interpretation
  characteristic of independent clauses
• register span
• intensity span
• speech rate
• typical of classical IUs realizing independent
  clauses
• link with their discourse functions
  (especially continuative)?

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4. Discussion

• Relevance Subjectivity ARCs show discourse
  discontinuity through high onset values.
• Even stronger for subjectivity ARCs more
  important rupture with discourse topic
• cf. shift between referential and
  interpretative levels the information conveyed
  in a subjectivity ARC is somehow more
   peripheral  than that in a relevance ARC.
• Lower intensity level values for subjectivity
  ARCs sometimes found within subjective episodes
  as an idiosyncratic strategy (Di Cristo et al.
  2004)

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4. Discussion

• Clear-cut differences in speech rates, however,
  cannot be analysed in terms of discourse
  functions influence of a syntactic parameter
  (sentential or non-sentential antecedent).
• As most subjectivity ARCs qualify a sentential
  antecedent (9 out of 10), the 2 parameters are
  difficult to separate.
• gt Further research required

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5. Conclusion

• This preliminary study clearly shows that various
  discourse functions associated with one specific
  syntactic structure give way to differences in
  prosodic realization.
• Prosodic markers can serve as input constraints
  influencing the pragmatic interpretation of one
  syntactic structure in discourse.

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5. Conclusion

• This work also questions the traditional boundary
  between independent and embedded clauses, for
  which ARCs are clearly problematic.

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5. Conclusion

• Further research
• Extended description of the prosodic
  characteristics of ARCs in relation to their
  discourse functions.
• Tackle the independent/embedded status of ARCs
  from a prosodic point of view, through the study
  of continuative ARCs in particular.

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• Thank you for your attention!
• cyril.auran_at_univ-lille3.fr
• rudy.loock_at_univ-lille3.fr