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Intonation and Discourse Structure in English: Phonological and Phonetic Markers of Local and Global Discourse Structure Dissert

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Intonation and Discourse Structure in English: Phonological and Phonetic Markers of Local and Global Discourse Structure Dissert INTONATION AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURE IN ENGLISH: PHONOLOGICAL AND PHONETIC MARKERS OF LOCAL AND GLOBAL DISCOURSE STRUCTURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Rebecca Herman, B.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1998 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Mary Beckman, Adviser Professor Keith Johnson Adviser Professor Craige Roberts Department of Linguistics Copyright by Rebecca Herman 1998 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the relationship between sound structure and discourse structure in English. In English, phrases are marked by edge tones which have discourse functions. A high edge tone indicates that the phrase is to be interpreted with respect to a subsequent phrase, while a low edge tone means that the phrase does not form an interpretive unit with the subsequent phrase. How the tones in a phrase marked by a low edge tone are implemented phonetically conveys how complete a sub-topic is. Thus the choice of edge tone conveys local discourse relationships between pairs of phrases while the phonetic implementation conveys global discourse relationships– the grouping of sets of phrases into topics and sub-topics. These hypotheses about the discourse functions of edge tone categories and phonetic implementation were tested experimentally using pairs of discourses with at least two sub-topics in which the sub-topics occurred in different orders. The expectation is that the phrase at the end of a sub-topic will have the same choice of edge tones in both orders of occurrence, but that the tones in the phrase will be implemented differently in the two cases. The experiment involved short discourses which were recorded, transcribed tonally, played to listeners to see if they could distinguish the utterances by discourse position, and analyzed acoustically. The results showed that the same edge tones were used in a large proportion of the utterances, verifying the prediction that edge tones mark local discourse relationships. In ii the utterances which were identifiable by listeners as to discourse location and which had the same or similar sequences of tones, the phonetic implementations of the tones varied in systematic ways between the two utterances in a pair, thus verifying the hypothesis that phonetic implementation of tones signals global discourse relationships. In sum, this dissertation explores how phonological and phonetic aspects of the intonational structure function as linguistic cues to local and global information structure in discourses. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my adviser, Mary Beckman, for setting me on an interesting path and for help along the way. Thank you for always reminding me of the forest (and sometimes even an adjacent grove or two) when I was lost among all the trees. I am also very grateful to Keith Johnson for always helping me to get experiments set up and running properly, for inspiring me to do a perception test and a multi-dimensional scaling analysis, for helping with statistics questions and with interpretation of data in general, and for always having good advice for me. A special thanks to Craige Roberts for helping me to clarify the issues, for the insightful comments, and for always having an encouraging word. I would also like to thank Jignesh Patel for being a wonderful systems administrator. His work is much appreciated. Thanks also to all of the undergraduate subjects from Linguistics 201 and Linguistics 371 who participated in my experiments, and to their instructors who let me solicit subjects in their classes. This dissertation would not have been possible without them. A special thanks to Julie McGory for ToBI transribing all of my materials. I couldn’t have asked for a better transcriber. I would also like to thank Laurie Maynell for last-minute recording of example sentences. I wish to thank my parents for encouraging me along every step by step by step of my thousand mile journey. Thanks also to Gid Herman for always looking out for me. And thanks to Jonathan, Liz, Rachel, and Naomi Herman for always being there for me. iv I also want to thank Rachna Prasad, who was there week-by-week, listening, advising, sympathizing, sharing, and always, always, always cheering me on. Also, thanks to Molly Homer for the friendship, the support, and the confidence in me. Thanks for always cheering me up when I am down, and for sharing my happiness when things are better. Thanks also to Svetlana Godjevac for many helpful discussions, for explaining semantic and pragmatic issues no matter how often I asked, and for the words of comfort and encouragement. I also want to thank Allison Blodgett, Paul Davis, Mariapaola D’Imperio, Barbara Gili-Fivela, Stefanie Jannedy, Hélène Loevenbruck, Laurie Maynell, Robert Poletto, Jennifer Venditti, and Pauline Welby for many, many long discussions and for the friendship. I would also like to thank my colleagues who make working in the Linguistics Department at Ohio State such a pleasant, fulfilling experience, including Kim Ainsworth-Darnell, Mary Bradshaw, Matt Makashay, Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen, Ben Munson, Frederick Parkinson, Shu-Hui Peng, Liz Strand, Jenny Vannest, Steve Winters, and Kiyoko Yoneyama. Thanks also to Khalil Iskarous, Abdulkadir Hassan Mohammed, Maria McCormick, Sharon and Ken Housinger, Susannah and Ted Levin, and Margaret and David Lewis for friendship over the years. This dissertation would not have been possible without the friendship and support of all of the people listed here, for which I am truly grateful. Part of the support for work on this dissertation came from an NSF graduate student fellowship research allowance. Work on this dissertation was completed with support from an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship. v VITA July 6, 1970........................... Born – Bloomington, Indiana 1992.................................... B.A. Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana. 1992-93, 1994-1996 ................. NSF Graduate Fellow, The Ohio State University 1993-1994, 1996-1997 .............. Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 1997-1998............................. Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. R. Herman, M. Beckman, and K. Honda. Subglottal Pressure and Final Lowering in English. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. (1997) 2. R. Herman. Syntactically Governed Accentuation in Balinese. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Papers from the Linguistics Laboratory. no. 50. Kim Ainsworth- Darnell and Mariapaola D’Imperio, eds. (1997) 3. R. Herman. Final Lowering in Kipare. Phonology. 13:2. (1996) 4. R. Herman. Prosodic Structure in SiSwati. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Papers in Phonology. no. 48. David Dowty, Rebecca Herman, Elizabeth Hume, and Panayiotis Pappas, eds. (1996) 5. R. Herman. Final Lowering in Kipare. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Papers from the Linguistics Laboratory. no. 45. Stefanie Jannedy, ed. (1995) 6. R. Herman. The Structure of Affricates in Kuvi (A Constraint-Based Account). Proceedings of the Eleventh Eastern States Conference on Linguistics. Janet M. Fuller, Ho Han, and David Parkinson, eds. (1994) 7. R. Herman. ‘La Double Vie de W’ or the status of [w] in Karuk. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences. vol. 24, no. 1/2. (1994) vi FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Linguistics vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract.. ...........................................................................................ii Acknowledgments................................................................................. iv Vita ..................................................................................................vi List of Figures .....................................................................................xi Chapters: 1. Introduction ...............................................................................1 1.1 Basic Assumptions About Intonation and Discourse Structure ............1 1.2 Phonetic Correlates of Discourse Structure ..................................5 1.3 A Phonological Model of Intonation ..........................................10 1.4 An Explicit Model of Discourse Structure. ...................................18 1.5 The Meaning of Edge Tones and the Discourse Functions of Phonetic Implementations ......................................................47 1.6 Two Hypotheses about Phonological Edge Tones, Phonetic Implementation, and Local and Global Discourse Structures ..............56 1.6.1 Phonological Edge Tones and Local Discourse Structures........ 56 1.6.2 Phonetic Implementations and Global Discourse Structures ......59 1.7 Testing the Hypotheses– Experimental Design ..............................60 1.8 Summary .........................................................................67 viii 2. Methods ...................................................................................68 2.1 Recording ........................................................................68 2.1.1 Materials .................................................................68 2.1.2 Subjects.................................................................. 74 2.1.3 Methods .................................................................76 2.2 Transcription of Intonational Tones ...........................................76 2.2.1 Transcription................................. ...........................76 2.2.2 Mapping Tone Similarity Space ......................................77
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