Contrastive Focus Research Articles

Pragmatic ellipsis and its pragmatic consequences

This article focuses on the chunk ye shi (literally “also be”) in Chinese. Ye is a contrastive focus marker, yet in some ye shi sentences, there is no overt alternative for contrast. Besides, these sentences carry specific pragmatic implicatures. We propose that these sentences do not form a challenge to ye’s status as a contrastive focus marker. Ye has two core properties: (1) it presupposes the existence of alternatives to contrast with the focus it marks; (2) it implicates a sense of counter-expectation when marking the focus. These two properties can account for all uses of ye shi, including their specific implicatures. Moreover, these two properties are assumed to be shared by ye-type contrastive focus markers cross-linguistically. The alternative evoked by ye shi can be elided through a mechanism named by us as pragmatic ellipsis. It differs from the traditional syntactic ellipsis. The way how ye shi obtains the pragmatic ellipsis use reflects a syntax-to-pragmatics way of grammaticalisation, challenging the unidirectionality hypothesis proposed by Hopper and Traugott (1993).

Prosody matters: Preserved prominence marking strategies in people with Parkinson's disease independent of motor status.

While many studies focus on segmental variation in Parkinsonian speech, little is known about prosodic modulations reflecting the ability to adapt to communicative demands in people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD). This type of prosodic modulation is important for social interaction, and it involves modifications in speech melody (intonational level) and articulation of consonants and vowels (segmental level). The present study investigates phonetic cues of prosodic modulations with respect to different focus structures in mild dysarthric PwPD as a function of levodopa. Acoustic and kinematic speech parameters of 25 PwPD were assessed in two motor conditions. Speech production data from PwPD were collected before (medication-OFF) and after levodopa intake (medication-ON) by means of 3-D electromagnetic articulography. On the acoustic level, intensity, pitch, and syllable durations were analyzed. On the kinematic level, movement duration and amplitude were investigated. Spatio-temporal modulations of speech parameters were examined and compared across three different prosodic focus structures (out-of-focus, broad focus, contrastive focus) to display varying speech demands. Overall, levodopa had beneficial effects on motor performance, speech loudness, and pitch modulation. Acoustic syllable durations and kinematic movement durations did not change, revealing no systematic effects of motor status on the temporal domain. In contrast, there were spatial modulations of the oral articulators: tongue tip movements were smaller and lower lip movements were larger in amplitude under levodopa, reflecting a more agile and efficient articulatory movement under levodopa. Thus, respiratory-phonatory functions and consonant production improved, while syllable duration and tongue body kinematics did not change. Interestingly, prominence marking strategies were comparable between the medication conditions under investigation, and in fact, appear to be preserved in mild dysarthric PwPD.

The interaction of tonal alignment with vowel length and syllable structure in Lebanese Arabic

Research on a variety of languages has shown that tonal alignment in pitch accents can be influenced by segmental factors such as syllable structure, onset type, and phonological vowel length (e.g., Ladd et al., 2000; Maddieson, 1997). However, the majority of work on these topics has been on European languages. The current study examines the interaction of these factors in the Beirut dialect of Lebanese Arabic. Disyllabic words with initial, stressed syllables that were either open or closed and contained either a long or a short vowel and had a simple or complex onset were examined when non-focused and in contrastive focus. Contrastive focus was associated with a wider f0 range. The focus pitch accent was H* or L+H*. In terms of segmental effects, neither vowel length nor syllable structure had a significant effect on tonal alignment. Timing of the f0 peak was found to be consistently about 45 msec from vowel onset. This study contributes to the literature on tonal alignment by examining a variety of Arabic that is understudied in terms of intonation.

Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean-speaking children: the use of prosodic phrasing.

Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean is known to be achieved primarily through prosodic phrasing, different from the use of prosody for this purpose in many other languages. This study investigates how children use prosodic phrasing for focus-marking purposes in Seoul Korean, compared to adults. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited semi-spontaneous production of SOV sentences in various focus conditions from monolingual Seoul Korean-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years. We found that the children varied prosodic boundaries to distinguish narrow focus from pre-focus and broad focus in a largely adult-like manner at the age of 4 to 5; at this age, they did not distinguish narrow focus from post-focus or contrastive focus using prosodic boundaries, similar to the adults. Their use of the prosodic boundaries in distinguishing the focus conditions was not fully adult-like in terms of frequency until the age of 10 to 11. In conjunction with the findings of previous studies on the acquisition of focus marking in Germanic languages, performed using a similar experimental method, our findings suggest that Seoul Korean-speaking children acquire the use of prosodic phrasing earlier than Dutch-speaking children acquiring the use of pitch accent but slightly later than Stockholm Swedish-speaking children acquiring the use of a prominence-marking high tone. These findings imply that the rate of focus-marking acquisition depends on the transparency of the form-meaning mapping between the phonological cue and focus.

The development of prosodic focus marking in French.

French is traditionally described as a language favoring syntactic means to mark focus, yet recent research shows that prosody is also used. We examine how French-speaking children use prosody to realize narrow focus and contrastive focus in the absence of syntactic means, compared to adults. We elicited SVO sentences using a virtual robot-mediated picture-matching task from monolingual French-speaking adults (N = 11), 4- to 5-year-olds (N = 12), and 7- to 8-year-olds (N = 15). These sentences were produced with narrow focus on either the subject or the object and contrastive focus on the object. Linear mixed-effects logistic regression modeling on duration, mean intensity, mean pitch, and pitch range of the subject and object nouns showed that the 4- to 5-year-olds did not use any of these prosodic cues for focus marking but the 7- to 8-year-olds distinguished narrow focus from non-focus through an increase in duration, mean intensity and to a lesser degree, mean pitch in the object nouns, largely similar to the adults, and tended to use mean pitch for this purpose in the subject nouns, different from the adults, who used duration. Our study corroborates previous findings that French-speaking 4- to 5-year-olds do not use prosody for focus. Further, it provides new evidence that 7- to 8-year-olds use prosody to mark narrow focus on the object in a more adult-like manner than narrow focus on the subject, arguably caused by a more dominant role of syntactic means in the subject position in French. Together, these findings show that syntax-dominance can influence both the route and the rate of acquisition of prosodic focus marking.

Semantico-Pragmatic Approach to the Uses of autem in Plautus

This work aims to study the syntactic and semantico-pragmatic properties of autem in Plautus. The connector has a fundamental binary value expressing the notion of addition and that of opposition. Therefore, autem is used as an addition marker to relate syntactic constituents, a marker ensuring the reorientation of language activity on the level of enunciation, a limitation marker intended to make a thematic selection among elements of a paradigm as well as a marker of contrastive focus with argumentative or non-argumentative scope. Besides, the study of extra-linguistic data has highlighted the functions of autem linking with non-verbal and aspects of the discourse situation.

Mandarin-speaking Children With Cochlear Implants Face Challenges in Using F0 Expansion to Express Contrastive Focus.

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in perceiving fundamental frequency (F0) information because CIs do not transmit F0 effectively. In Mandarin, F0 can contrast meanings at the word level, that is, via lexical tones with distinct F0 contours, and signal contrastive relations between words at the utterance-level, that is, via contrastive focus with expanded F0 range and longer duration. Mandarin-speaking children with CIs have been reported to face challenges in producing distinct F0 contours across tones, but early implantation facilitates tonal acquisition. However, it is still unclear if utterance-level prosody, such as contrastive focus, is also challenging for these children, and if early implantation also offers benefits for focus production. Therefore, this study asked how accurately children with CIs can produce contrastive focus, and if early implantation leads to more accurate focus production, with acoustic patterns approaching that of children with typical hearing (TH). Participants included 55 Mandarin-speaking children (3 to 7 years) with CIs and 55 age-matched children with TH. Children produced noun phrases with and without contrastive focus, such as RED-COLORED cat versus red-colored cat. Three adult native listeners perceptually scored the productions as correct or incorrect. The "correct" productions were then acoustically analyzed in terms of F0 range and duration. Based on the perceptual scores, children with CIs produced focus with significantly lower accuracy (38%) than their TH peers (84%). The acoustic analysis on their "correct" productions showed that children with TH used both F0 and duration to mark focus, producing focal syllables with an expanded F0 range and long duration, and postfocal syllables with a reduced F0 range and short duration. However, children with CIs differed from children with TH in that they produced focal syllables with long duration but not an expanded F0 range, although they produced postfocal syllables with a reduced F0 range and short duration like their TH peers. In addition, early implantation correlated with the percept of more accurate focus productions and better use of F0 range in focal marking. This study finds that Mandarin-speaking children with CIs are still learning to apply appropriate acoustic cues to contrastive focus. The challenge appears to lie in the use of an expanded F0 range to mark focus, probably related to the limited transmission of F0 information through the CI devices. These findings thus have implications for parents and those working with children with CIs, showing that utterance-level prosody also requires speech remediation, and underscores the critical role of identifying problems early in the acquisition of F0 functions in Mandarin, not only at the word level but also at the utterance-level.

The functions of full nominal reduplication in Jakarta Indonesian: A corpus-based examination

Existing literature on full nominal reduplication in Indonesian describes the process as marking plurality or variation of type/kind (Sneddon et al. 2010). There are conflicting claims in the literature as to whether fully reduplicated nouns can cooccur with numerals and/or classifiers (Chung 2000; Dalrymple & Mofu 2012). This paper presents a corpus study of full nominal reduplication (FNR) in Jakarta Indonesian (JI), a recent variant of Malay which emerged as a blend of Jakarta Malay (JM) and Standard Indonesian (SI). In particular, I examine the cooccurrence and linear ordering of other nominal elements with fully reduplicated nouns (FRNs), including quantifiers, numerals, classifiers, demonstratives, possessive pronouns, and the definite article -nya. The corpus study found no instances of FRNs cooccurring with numerals, but one potential instance of an FRN cooccurring with a classifier. FRNs can cooccur with all other nominal elements. The linear ordering of these elements in JI more closely resembles the ordering in JM than in SI in that the FRNs may either precede or follow demonstratives. The corpus study also explores the interpretation of FNR as it pertains to plurality and variation of kind. It presents evidence that an additional function of FNR in JI is contrastive focus.

Sentence salience contrastive learning for abstractive text summarization

Abstractive Text summarization aims to generate a short summary for a document while preserving salient information. Recently, contrastive learning has been extended from visual representation to summarization tasks. At present, the methods of contrastive learning summarization focus on modeling the global semantics of source documents, targets and candidate summaries to maximize their similarities. However, they ignore the influence of sentence semantics in the document. In this paper, we propose a sentence-level salience contrastive learning method to help the model capture salient information and denoise. The model expresses the sentence salience according to the semantic similarity between the summaries and sentences of the source document, and integrates the similarity distance into the contrastive loss in the form of soft weights. Therefore, our model maximize the similarity between summaries and salient information, while minimizing the similarity between summaries and potential noise. We have verified our method in three widely used datasets, CNN/Daily Mail, XSum and PubMed. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the baseline performance and achieve competitive performance in the existing contrastive learning methods.

Linguistic change in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: a corpus linguistic comparison of language contact phenomena in Romance languages

Abstract The radical social, political, and economic changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are clearly reflected in language use through the appearance of numerous neologisms, most of which can be considered borrowings from English. In this article, we take a contrastive linguistic approach and focus on the emergence of new lexemes in the press language of four Romance languages (European Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and European French) with a special focus on language contact. Since no press corpora were available with specific data on the COVID-19 pandemic, we created our own corpora for the entire year 2020 using Python in order to compare how lexical innovation is dealt with in the four languages. Our results show that conceptual innovation, especially when it occurs abruptly, can lead to equivalent, often phonotactically adapted neologisms in the case of neighbouring languages. However, the integration of foreign words and the formation of neologisms also show language-specific peculiarities which are not only related to structural characteristics of the respective languages, but also to sociolinguistic and sociocultural factors. Our study elaborates on the relationship between these factors and shows the potential of contrastive and computational approaches for the study of lexical repercussions of language contact.

Вариативност при реализацията на българска интонация

The study presents the intonational phonology of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (CSB) and the BG_ToBI annotation system. CSB uses the following pitch accents: L*, L*+H, L+H*, H*, H+!H*; phrase accents: L-, H-, and !H-; and boundary tones: %H, L%, H%, !H%. In the realization of the pitch accents, there is often variable alignment between the tonal target and the boundaries of the lexically stressed syllable. This variability is due to both speaker-specific speech strategies and the position of the stressed syllable within the utterance. For example, when the H* pitch accent is near the beginning of the utterance, the high target is usually reached towards the end of the stressed syllable. When it is near the end of the utterance, the high target is reached towards the beginning of the stressed syllable. In rising accents (L*+H and L+H*), the high tone can be delayed up to three syllables after its original target. In signaling the information structure of the utterance, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the type of focus and the choice of pitch accent: the same type of focus can be ex-pressed with different accent types, and the same accent can signal different types of focus. For example, H* can signal broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive focus; L+H* can signal narrow focus and contrastive focus. Thematic material is not necessarily deaccented. From a pragmatic and functional perspective, four different tunes associated with the various vocative types in Bulgarian are presented: neutral vocative (L+H* L-%), insistent vocative (L+<H* L-% [+long]), challenging chant (L* H-L% [+long]), and vocative chant (L+H* !H-% [+long]). When the final syllable is lengthened, the vowel in it is not fully reduced, which contradicts the phonological pattern of vowel reduction in CSB.

Focus Fronting in a Language with In Situ Marking: The Case of Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà

This paper discusses the structural realisation of contrastive focus in the Grassfields Bantu language Bamileke Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà, yet another language with grammatically optional focus fronting. We show that the realisation of contrastive focus in Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà is by default marked in situ with the morphological focus marker á. We further show that á introduces an additional, not-at-issue exhaustivity inference as part of its lexical meaning. Taken together, this means that two often-discussed interpretive triggers of grammatically optional focus fronting, namely, contrastivity and exhaustivity, are not responsible for triggering Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà’s focus left-dislocation. Rather, the main semantic contribution of focus fronting consists in triggering an existence presupposition, a discourse-semantic effect well known from other focus–background bipartitions, possibly in combination with other, softer discourse-semantic effects, such as the special emphasis required in cases of discourse unexpectedness.

On the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya

In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.

English Prosodic Focus Marking by Cantonese Trilingual Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The current study investigated English prosodic focus marking by autistic and typically developing (TD) Cantonese trilingual children, and examined the potential differences in this regard compared to native English-speaking children. Forty-eight participants were recruited with 16 speakers for each of the three groups (Cantonese-speaking autistic [CASD], Cantonese-speaking TD [CTD], and English-speaking TD [ETD] children), and prompt questions were designed to elicit desired focus type (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). Mean duration, mean fundamental frequency (F0), F0 range, mean intensity, and F0 curves were used as the acoustic correlates for linear mixed-effects model fitting and functional data analyses in relation to groups and focus conditions (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive pre-, on-, and post-focus). The CTD group had post-focus compression (PFC) patterns via reducing mean duration, narrowing F0 range, and lowering mean F0, F0 curve, and mean intensity for words under both narrow and contrastive post-focus conditions, while the CASD group only had shortened mean duration and lowered F0 curves. However, neither the CTD group nor CASD group showed much of on-focus expansion (OFE) patterns. The ETD group marked OFE by increasing mean duration, mean F0, mean intensity, and higher F0 curve for words under on-focus conditions. The CTD group utilized more acoustic cues than the CASD group when it comes to PFC. The ETD group differed from the CASD and CTD groups in the use of OFE. Furthermore, both the CASD and CTD groups showed positive first language transfer in the use of duration and intensity and, potentially, successful acquisition in the use of F0 for prosodic focus marking. Meanwhile, the differences in the use of OFE between the Cantonese-speaking and English-speaking groups, not PFC, might indicate that Cantonese-speaking children acquire PFC prior to OFE.

In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish

This explorative study examines intonation contours in neutral and non-neutral statements of Paraguayan Spanish, a variety shaped by extensive contact with Guarani, a co-official language of Paraguay. Paraguayan Spanish displays both lexical and syntactic borrowings from Guarani, along with innovative intonation patterns not found in other Spanish varieties. Previous but still limited research on yes/no and wh-questions in this variety suggests the emergence of a unique intonational system, possibly of a hybrid nature, in both Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Guarani bilinguals. To date, no comprehensive description of intonation patterns in Paraguayan Spanish statements exists. The present study addresses this gap by analyzing data obtained through a Discourse Completion Task, covering broad-focus statements, contrastive focus, exclamatives, and statements of the obvious. Data were collected in 2014 from two monolingual speakers, eleven bilingual Spanish-dominant speakers, and eight bilingual Guarani-dominant speakers. The intonation is formalized using the Autosegmental–Metrical model of intonational phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices labeling system. The findings reveal three main realizations of nuclear accents (L+H*, H+L*, and innovative >H+L*) in neutral and non-neutral declarative sentences, lengthening of syllables, diverse syntactical strategies, and lexical borrowings. The study contributes to the understanding of a lesser-studied Spanish variety and offers insights into theoretical aspects of contact linguistics.

Acoustic characteristics of non-native Lombard speech in the DELNN corpus

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, has been extensively studied in native speakers, while non-native Lombard speech research is limited. This article presents the first corpus of non-native Lombard speech, the Dutch English Lombard Native Non-Native corpus, which includes plain and Lombard read speech from native American-English, non-native English (native Dutch), and native Dutch women. The location of contrastive focus is systematically varied in the sentences. We investigated how intensity, spectral center of gravity, word duration, and VOT varies in the corpus as a function of plain versus Lombard speech and whether it is modulated by the speaker’s nativeness and of the language. We did not find differences in how the native and non-native English speakers adapted their English speech in noise, indicating that the Dutch non-native speakers produced Lombard speech similarly to the native English. The comparison of the native Dutch and non-native English sentences produced by the same participants nevertheless suggests that, for all acoustic measurements except word duration, the Dutch speakers adapted their Lombard speech differently in native Dutch than in non-native English. Combined, this would indicate that, when speaking English, Dutch speakers adapt their way of speaking in noise to the way native English speakers do.

On an undocumented type of predicate ellipsis in Spanish and its consequences for the theory of ellipsis licensing

In this paper, we introduce and discuss a type of ellipsis in Spanish, undocumented in the previous literature, which we will refer to as Predicate Phrase Ellipsis (PredP-Ellipsis), and its consequences for the theory of ellipsis licensing. PredP-Ellipsis is a type of ellipsis in which the complement of a copular verb undergoes deletion, whenever there is contrastive focus (typically encoded in Polarity) involved in the sentence. We provide an account for why this type of ellipsis is allowed in a language that lacks lower ellipses in the verbal domain (such as vP-Ellipsis), and implement our proposal by introducing an [E]-feature which is typically licensed when it enters into an Agree relation with a Polarity head higher in the structure.

Verum, focus and evidentiality in Conchucos Quechua

Abstract For most Quechuan languages, the discourse enclitic =mi has been described as a (contrastive) focus marker and/or as a marker of direct evidentiality. In this paper, I argue that these claims do not seem to apply to Conchucos Quechua (Ancash, Peru). To challenge the association between =mi and focus, I offer a quantitative analysis that strongly suggests that this connection is not categorical in nature. To contest the association between =mi and direct evidentiality, I offer a qualitative analysis based on a question-under-discussion (QUD) model of discourse structure, using naturalistic data. I will argue that this enclitic is better characterised as an assertion operator, whose function is to bring closure to the current QUD (be it explicit or implicit). In this sense, the use of =mi is reminiscent of what has been called verum in the literature, and I thus explore how this characterisation fits within this discussion.

Manual and nonmanual cues used for the prosodic encoding of contrastive focus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language)

This paper explores the manual and nonmanual prosodic markers used to express contrastivefocus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language). To investigate this informationunit, videos extracted from the LSFB Corpus (Meurant 2015) and produced by six nativedeaf signers in two tasks were annotated and analysed. The preliminary results, basedon both quantitative and qualitative analyses, show that contrastive focus is encodedby discernible prosodic patterns in LSFB at the level of stress and intonation. Stressmarkers include variations in duration, mouth articulations, holds, and combinationsof manual cues. Regarding intonation, the results suggest a differentiation in the usageof body leans and head movements on contrastive focus and in the surroundingcontext, and support the notion of componentiality (or layering) of nonmanual markers.Ultimately, the study challenges the view of a one-to-one relationship between specificmarkers and their meanings, suggesting that meaning emerges from the interplayofmultiple resources.

Prosodic realization of identification and contrastive focus in Korean multiple accusative constructions

This study investigated how two different kinds of prominence-induced prosodic strengthening, identificational focus and contrastive focus, are phonetically realized in Seoul Korean. In the experiment, 16 native speakers produced target sentences presented in three different prosodic conditions: default reading, NP1-contrast, and NP2-contrast. The production data presented three crucial characteristics in the phonetic manifestations of prominence-induced prosodic strengthening in Seoul Korean. First, identificational focus gave rise to temporal expansion and pitch enhancement over the constructions under the focus. Second, contrastive focus brought about modification of temporal, pitch, and prosodic structures as well as pre- and post-focus compression. Finally, the two different types of prominence marking interacted with each other; the prosodic realization of contrastive focus overrode the prosodic realization of identificational focus, which was in line with the formal (syntactic) distinction of the two types of focus. To conclude, the current study demonstrates the interplay of information structure and discourse contexts in prosodic strengthening effects induced by prominence, especially in Seoul Korean, which lacks lexical stress and pitch accent.