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RISES ALL the WAY UP: the INTERPRETATION of PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES and DIALOGUE STRUCTURE Catherine Lai a DISSERTATION In

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RISES ALL the WAY UP: the INTERPRETATION of PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES and DIALOGUE STRUCTURE Catherine Lai a DISSERTATION In RISES ALL THE WAY UP: THE INTERPRETATION OF PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES AND DIALOGUE STRUCTURE Catherine Lai A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Supervisor of Dissertation: Jiahong Yuan, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Graduate Group Chair: Eugene Buckley, Associate Professor of Linguistics Dissertation Committee: Jiahong Yuan, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Mark Liberman, Trustee Professor of Phonetics Florian Schwarz, Assistant Professor of Linguistics ii Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my advisor Jiahong Yuan. I came to Penn with a somewhat vague idea of doing something in the realm of semantics and pragmatics, but it didn't take long to get hooked on phonetics with Jiahong as a teacher. I've benefitted enormously from his mentoring through the years on several other projects in addition to dissertation work. The fact that I've been able to do a dissertation right on the intersection of semantics, pragmatics, and phonetics is a testament to his open mindedness, intellectual vigor and unfailing practical support. Being at Penn has also allowed me the privilege of having Mark Liberman and Florian Schwarz on my dissertation committee. Mark never fails to amaze me with not only the breadth and depth of his knowledge on all areas of language research, but also his astounding clarity of thought. Mark's classes were critical for my developing the technical notions that have enabled me to investigate the prosody-meaning problem in a quantitative way. Florian's help was crucial in getting the semantic and pragmatic parts of this project on the right track. The way he has seen straight to the big conceptual problems through all the murky data I've thrown at him in the past years is truly impressive. Overall, I have to thank all of my committee for their continuous encouragement, vital criticism, and unbounded patience. I'm extremely indebted to the participants of our regular phonetics lab speech lunch group for generous feedback on many occasions. The work presented here has been improved by feedback from many other people at various venues. I have had particularly helpful interactions with Yi Xu, Nigel Ward, Agust´ınGravano, Yoon- sook Mo, Steve Isard, Sylvie Saget, Alan Black, Nick Campbell, Kristin Precoda, Andreas Stolcke, Maribel Romero, Chris Kennedy, Valentine Hacquard, participants at YRRSDS 2010/2011, but also many others! I also had the very good fortune of doing an internship at the Educational Testing Service. Although the work I did there was not directly related to my dissertation research, a lot of my thinking about prosody still owes a debt to my time there. So, special thanks to Klaus Zechner, Keelan Evanini, Su-Youn Yoon, and Derrick Higgins. My dissertation wouldn't have been possible without the strong foundations I've gotten from the linguistic graduate program at Penn. I've learned a lot from all my teachers here, but I've been particularly inspired by Aravind Joshi, Scott Weinstein, iii Charles Yang, Robin Clark, and Maribel Romero. I also need to thank Ani Nenkova for helpful feedback on my dissertation proposal. Very special thanks to Steven Bird at the University of Melbourne for steadfast support through my entire graduate career and for getting me interested in linguistics in the first place. Getting through the PhD would have been terrible without the help of Amy Forsyth, who has always been there to save the day from the administrative side and is just an all round great friend to have. The keystone to all of this has really been my fellow graduate students. I need to give a special shout out the many p.lab companions I've had over the years: Mar- jorie Pak, Yanyan Sui, Jingjing Tan, Aviad `Mr Sunshine' Eilam, Laia Mayol (P is for pragmatics too!), Josh Tauberer, Giang Nguyen, Yong-cheol Lee, Satoshi Nambu, and Keelan Evanini. We laughed, we cried, we gossipped ... we discussed everything from metrical structure to fashion, sometimes well past the witching hour.1 This will always be the place I grew up academically. I'll miss you! I'd also like to give a special shout out to my honorary p.labites: Ariel Diertani, Laurel `creaky' MacKen- zie, Aaron Dinkin, Brittany McLaughlin, Caitlin Light, and Lucas Champollion for sharing their general fabulousness in so many ways. Many other people have made Penn a great place to be, so cheers to Lukasz Abramowicz, Dimka Atanassov, Jana Beck, Stefanie Brody, Toni Cook, Michael Friesner, Kyle Gorman, Lauren Friedman, Joe Fruehwald, Jonathan Gress-Right, Damien Hall, Robert Lannon, Marielle Lerner, Maya Ravindranath, Lydia Rieck, Neville Ryant, Tatjana Scheffler, Augustin Speyer, Meredith Tamminga, and Joel Wallenberg. Sometimes it's easy to forget that life exists outside of the PhD, but my PhD def- initely wouldn't exist without the great support of many outside the campus bound- aries. I have the warmest thanks and love for the Tang family who have always looked after me as one of their own. My housemates at 540B made the initial transition to Philadelphia an easy one. Thanks to Nirav Mehta for a lot of laughs and for listening to a lot of raves and rants, and to Andrew Clausen for so much help over the years in many ways (but especially with the R!). But, of course, the Oscar goes to my parents, Christine and Kim Lai, for being the best, most patient and loving parents that anyone could possibly imagine. If I did anything good in my life, they get the credit. I promise to take you on that cruise! 1And we almost succeeded in getting to a mall in suburban Philadelphia on foot! Good times, crazy days. iv ABSTRACT RISES ALL THE WAY UP: THE INTERPRETATION OF PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES AND DIALOGUE STRUCTURE Catherine Lai Supervisor: Jiahong Yuan This dissertation is about what prosody contributes to dialogue interpretation. The view of prosody developed in this account is based on detailed quantitative investiga- tions of the prosodic forms and interpretations of cue word and declarative responses, specifically with respect to the distribution and interpretation of terminal pitch rises. Drawing on results from corpus, production and perception studies, I argue that the underlying contribution of terminal rises is to signal that the dialogue has not come to a viable stopping point with respect to the task at hand. This approach enables us to explain previously incongruent findings about the connection between rises and attitudes like uncertainty. From this perspective, the perception of such attitudes does not arise directly from prosodic form, but instead depends upon a range of con- textual factors. The experimental results indicate that the most important of these is how an utterance relates to the current question under discussion, rather than sen- tence or dialogue act type. However, variation in prosodic form is also affected by higher level factors like dialect, task, and speaker role: rises become more frequent on non-questioning moves as the need to co-ordinate becomes greater. The experimental results allows us to make significant headway in clarifying the relationship between the prosodic, semantic and information structural properties of responses. This, in turn, sheds light on several outstanding questions about the con- v tribution of the rise in fall-rise accents and its relationship to information structural categories like contrastive topic. Overall, we see that rises don't act on the propo- sition that carries them, nor do they mark out specific IS categories. Instead they reveal the state of the discourse from the speaker's perspective. From a method- ological point of view, I show that to gain a robust understanding the contribution of prosody on a particular meaning dimension, we need to take into account the baseline induced by the discourse configuration itself. These studies show the utility of using functional data analysis techniques to give more direct view of prosodic variation in larger datasets without manual prosodic annotation. vi Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Contents vi List of Tables xi List of Figures xiii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Prosody in Dialogue . .1 1.2 The Research Problems and Background . .3 1.3 The Data . .7 1.4 Key Claims . .8 1.4.1 Prosody, Discourse Attitude and Structure . .8 1.4.2 Local Discourse Effects: Response Types and QAC . .8 1.4.3 Higher Level Contextual Effects: Task and Role . 10 1.4.4 Phonetic Detail: More Bang for Your Buck . 11 1.5 Chapter Synopsis . 12 2 Prosody and Dialogue Structure Notions 15 2.1 Introduction . 15 2.2 Prosody Basics . 16 2.2.1 Basic Terminology . 16 2.2.2 Representations on Intonation . 18 2.3 Dialogue Structure Basics . 21 2.3.1 The Common Ground and Public Beliefs . 22 2.3.2 Tasks and Questions . 24 2.3.3 Dialogue Moves and Question Answer Congruence . 25 2.3.4 Dialogue Act Schemas . 27 vii 2.3.5 Where does prosody act? . 31 2.4 Previous Analyses of Final Rises . 31 2.4.1 Forward Dependence and Non-Finality . 31 2.4.2 Commitments and Contingency . 34 2.4.3 Tests, Modals, and the Common Ground . 36 2.4.4 Speaker Attitudes and Affect . 37 2.4.5 Iconicity and Universality . 39 2.5 The Way Forward . 41 3 Cue Words, Dialogue Acts and Prosody 44 3.1 Introduction . 44 3.2 Cue Word Responses . 46 3.2.1 Cue Words in the Switchboard Corpus . 46 3.2.2 Cue Words in SWBD-DAMSL . 47 3.2.3 Cue Words in the MDE Annotations . 51 3.2.4 Previous Work on Cue Words and Prosody .
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