Spoken Utterances Research Articles

Preverbs: Their syntax and semantics in West Africa

Preverbs are positionally-delimited grammatical forms that remain understudied. We examine their semantic classes in West Benue Congo (WBC) and its minor language Emai, which until recently was undocumented. Preverb classes in Emai display a subset of semantic categories identified in Dixon (1991, 2006, 2010) and Nuyts (2001, 2005, 2006, 2016). There are eight semantic classes for 30 odd preverb forms. They are apportioned according to their qualitative or quantitative character. Preverbs do not include traditional auxiliary categories of aspect, tense, and modality, which exhibit distinct diachronic and synchronic character. Common to preverbs is their orientation to grammatical subject, rather than utterance speaker. Members of each class ascribe a property to clausal subject. Preliminary evidence suggests that preverbs of similar semantic character exist in other West African languages.

An Analysis of Presuppositions in the Victory Speech of President Joe Biden

"Pragmatics is the study of the meaning of a speaker's utterance," according to Yule (1996:3).At the same time it’s the hearer, who deduces the meaning of the utterance from the context of what the speaker wants to convey. Speakers generally make indirect assumptions about the true picture of the situation in everyday status quo, and the meaning or comprehension of what is stated may be altered by the speaker's preconceptions (Haji, and Mohammed, 2019). On this note the notion of presupposition arises. Presupposition is defined as the speaker's implicit but communicated assumption. (Levinson, 1983) As a corollary, the intent of this present descriptive qualitative study is to investigate many types of presuppositions, their triggers and their relevance in Joe Biden's Victory Speech. Additionally, this discourse analysis research investigates what types of presuppositions, and their triggers are used by Biden, as well as it explores in depth the most prominent type of presupposition in the chosen speech. Yule's theory of presupposition classifies presupposition into six categories: existential presupposition, factual presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition, non-factual presupposition, and counterfactual presupposition. The study's data is comprised of statements that involve presupposition triggers. Levinson's list of lexical and syntactic triggers is adapted to identify presuppositions.The analysis of Biden’s speech has shown that the president heavily depends on lexical level triggers that have ranked first scoring eight hundred ninety-four occurrences, this means that this level triggers have effect on the speech. The topmost sub category trigger is Noun clauses that are the most prominent one with 683 occurrences. There were one hundred and eleven syntactic level triggers amongst which thirty-four of them are temporal clauses. It was also determined that, like every other speech, Biden's speech is laden with existential presupposition type (82.28%) and every other type of presuppositions has been identified in the president’s speech. The finding of a large number of triggers in this work would aid both linguistic and pedagogical domains.

Role of Misconceptions and Miscommunications in Theatrical Characters: Analyzing Speech Acts in the Namibian Plays

The current study examines the misconceptions and misunderstandings in the speech acts of the characters within three Namibian plays, namely The Oracle of Cidino written by Francis Nyathi, Checkmate by Maria Amakali, and The Bride and Broom penned by David Stone Ndjavera. Furthermore, this research examines the ways, which depict instances where characters’ speech acts lead to misconceptions and misunderstandings in the selected plays. Thereby, delving into these aspects, this study sheds light on the complexities of communication within the selected theatrical works. Moreover, this study examines the impact of miscommunication in discussions, which can culminate differences in understanding of speech acts between the speaker and the listener. The listener, however, is prone to a variety of emotional reactions, which arise from misunderstandings in a conversation - including feelings of joy, humor, embarrassment, regret or self-assumption, and impression of the speaker's utterance. The results of the enquiry evinced that the location-based actions performed by the characters in the three selected plays included declarative, interrogative, and imperative resources that are extracted from three Namibian plays. This is achieved by adopting a discourse analysis research approach, identifying, and explaining speech acts based on five classes of speech acts. Additionally, the current study is established on five functions of speech acts and on the other hand, the declarative statements proliferate the fewest of times since they require specified circumstances to be performed.

An efficient feature selection method for arabic and english speech emotion recognition using Grey Wolf Optimizer

Nowadays, analyzing and interpreting emotions through human speech communication have drawn a great attention in the field of human-computer interaction. Therefore, many speech recognition systems have been suggested to recognize the emotional states of the speaker utilizing the speech recordings of their spoken utterances. Feature extraction is an important step in building an emotion recognition system in which it is used to extract emotional features from speech data. However, not all extracted features are relevant to classify the emotion states of the speaker. The existence of irrelevant and redundant features generates unmeaningful patterns that lead to inaccurate and undesirable emotion classification performance. Therefore, this study proposes an intelligent feature selection method based on a novel bio-inspired optimization algorithm that mimics the hunting mechanism of wolves in the nature, called Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier, to find the most relevant subset of features to enhance the classification performance of an emotion recognition systems. The proposed method is called GWO-KNN. Emotion classification is performed on three distinct databases including Arabic Emirati-accented speech database, Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song dataset (RAVDESS), and Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion dataset (SAVEE). A combined or single feature extraction method is applied to extract the features from each dataset. The proposed method provides better classification performance for speech emotion recognition system compared to classical methods such as bat algorithm (BAT), cuckoo search (CS), White Shark Optimizer (WSH), and arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA). Our proposed method also surpasses several state-of-the-art recent approaches that use the same datasets.

Development of Supervised Speaker Diarization System Based on the PyAnnote Audio Processing Library.

Diarization is an important task when work with audiodata is executed, as it provides a solution to the problem related to the need of dividing one analyzed call recording into several speech recordings, each of which belongs to one speaker. Diarization systems segment audio recordings by defining the time boundaries of utterances, and typically use unsupervised methods to group utterances belonging to individual speakers, but do not answer the question "who is speaking?" On the other hand, there are biometric systems that identify individuals on the basis of their voices, but such systems are designed with the prerequisite that only one speaker is present in the analyzed audio recording. However, some applications involve the need to identify multiple speakers that interact freely in an audio recording. This paper proposes two architectures of speaker identification systems based on a combination of diarization and identification methods, which operate on the basis of segment-level or group-level classification. The open-source PyAnnote framework was used to develop the system. The performance of the speaker identification system was verified through the application of the AMI Corpus open-source audio database, which contains 100 h of annotated and transcribed audio and video data. The research method consisted of four experiments to select the best-performing supervised diarization algorithms on the basis of PyAnnote. The first experiment was designed to investigate how the selection of the distance function between vector embedding affects the reliability of identification of a speaker's utterance in a segment-level classification architecture. The second experiment examines the architecture of cluster-centroid (group-level) classification, i.e., the selection of the best clustering and classification methods. The third experiment investigates the impact of different segmentation algorithms on the accuracy of identifying speaker utterances, and the fourth examines embedding window sizes. Experimental results demonstrated that the group-level approach offered better identification results were compared to the segment-level approach, and the latter had the advantage of real-time processing.

Paralanguage Influences in Intercultural Communication of Foreign Nationals in Cebu, Philippines

Paralanguage is a vital component of metacommunication in human interaction that allows people to convey nuanced meaning and emotion and add layers of meaning to their spoken utterances through manipulation of the manner of speech. This is why paralanguage is suggested to be considered as the primary facet of communicative competence in effective communication. However, this is adversely hampered by the challenges between people with different cultural backgrounds. This is because cultural differences have many effects on communication since people from different cultures communicate using distinct styles of their language, words, gestures, phrases, and other non-lexical components of speech, such as diction, pitch, and tone. Intercultural communication also includes low and high context cultures. Hence, the need to conduct this study is crucial to explore the influence of paralanguage on communication among speakers from different cultures and understand the influence of culture on the communication experiences of people coming from varied speech communities. The study employed narrative analysis as a lens to collect and analyze the data gathered from the participants. The foreign nationals were interviewed as study participants to deliberately examine the intercultural challenges in paralanguage. Data were deduced using Miles and Huberman’s thematic analytical framework. Findings revealed that paralanguage greatly influenced the communication engagements of foreign nationals with the local people and that this influence is also associated with the existing cultural background of the foreign and local communicators involved.

Investigation of Illocutionary Acts Uttered by the Characters tn the Brave Movie

The research aimed to determine the sorts and most prevalent illocutionary acts used by the characters in the Brave animated movie. The illocutionary act was defined as the purpose for which the speaker utters something. The research focused on the main character and the entire conversation between each character in the movie. The research applied a qualitative method where the data were taken from the script uttered by all of the characters in the Brave movie who uttered the illocutionary acts. The data collection technique was done in five steps; made the data analyzing format, watched the movie and searched the script, read the script repeatedly, identified the utterances, and classified the utterances and meaning into the illocutionary act. The basic theory used was the illocutionary act proposed by Searle and Austin. There were 85 illocutionary acts found in Brave movie, and it was divided into five classifications: representative, directive, expressive, declarative, and commissive. The result shows that there are 10 (11,76%) representative acts, 42 (49,41) directive acts, 0 the commissive act, 19 (22,35%) expressive acts, and 10 (11,76%) declarative acts. As a result, directives are the illocutionary acts that predominate in Brave movie.

TINDAK TUTUR EKSPRESIF PADA KOLOM KOMENTAR YOUTUBE ROCKY GERUNG “GUBERNUR NTT BIKIN HEBOH, PERINTAHKAN SISWA SMA MASUK JAM 5 PAGI. SALAH PAHAM DUNIA PENDIDIKAN”

The tendency of someone to express expressive speech on social media is the background in this study. Many users express themselves by commenting on someone's account video uploads. The purpose of this study was to find out and understand the forms of expressive speech acts in the Rocky Gerung Youtube comments column entitled “The Governor of NTT Makes a Scene, Orders High School Students to Enter at 5 in the Morning. Misunderstanding of the World of Education”. The theory of expressive speech acts in this study is the combined theory of Searle, Nadar, Leech, and Tarigan. The approach in this research is a qualitative approach with content analysis method. The source of the data in this study is a comment on Rocky Gerung's Youtube "The Governor of NTT Makes a Thrill, Orders High School Students to Enter at 5 in the Morning. Misunderstanding of the World of Education”. The data used are expressive speech acts contained in the comments. Data collection techniques used are observing, documenting, and taking notes. The collected data were then analyzed using the Burhan Bungin analysis technique. Based on the results of the study, 156 utterances were found which were identified as expressive speech acts. The most frequent speech acts were expressive speech acts of blaming because the policies set were contradictory so that people expressed their psychological attitudes in the form of blaming comments, while the speech acts that were not found from the results of the analysis were expressive speech acts of interrupting, welcoming, forgiving, condolences, and accusing. The analysis also found new data findings, namely: contempt, support, expressions of disappointment, surprise, and sadness, as well as found several non-literal speech acts with the utterances spoken.

SEEING MAXIM VIOLATION IN EFL INTERACTION

In relating with other people, the cooperative principle may be done to make a dialogue run well and efficiently. However, there are chances when speakers have to violate a maxim because of some reason. Maxim of quality talks about; first, the participants in conversation. Second, they should not say something without adequate evidence. Maxim of quantity is concerned with providing information as required. It should not be less informative or more informative. Maxim of relevance recommends that the utterance should be relevant to the topic being conversed. Maxim of manner requires the speaker's utterance to be understandable or comprehensible or not ambiguous. It should be not be blurred. This study aims to determine the kinds of maxim violations done by the students during classroom interaction and the reasons behind the students violating the maxims. This study used observation and interview methods to collect the data. The study results show that there are three maxims violated by students, namely violating the maxim of quantity, relevance, and quality, with a total of 25 utterances. The students violate the maxim because they want to save face and build someone’s belief. This study found that the students violated three maxims when interacting with the teacher. They were violating the maxim of quality, violating the maxim of quantity, and violating the maxim of relevance. This study found 2 violating the maxim of quality, 14 violating the maxim of quantity, and 9 violating the maxim of relevance.

Probabilistic modeling of rational communication with conditionals

While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic reasoning about indicative conditionals which flexibly integrates gradient beliefs about richly structured world states. We model listeners' update of their prior beliefs about the causal structure of the world and the joint probabilities of the consequent and antecedent based on assumptions about the speaker's utterance production protocol. We show that, when supplied with natural contextual assumptions, our model uniformly explains a number of inferences attested in the literature, including epistemic inferences, conditional perfection and the dependency between antecedent and consequent of a conditional. We argue that this approach also helps explain three puzzles introduced by Douven (2012) about updating with conditionals: depending on the utterance context, the listener's belief in the antecedent may increase, decrease or remain unchanged.

Code-Switching on Tansi Language Spoken by People in Lembah Segar Sub-District

People usually choose different codes in different situation in every interaction. The phenomenon of code-switching is common in bilingualism and occurs in conversation. Code-switching occurs when conversation use two languages together to the extent that they change from one language to other in the course of a single utterance. By using qualitative method, this study was aimed to analyze the types and function of code-switching found in the utterance spoken by people in Lembah Segar sub-district. The researcher analyzed sixty three utterance of Minangkabaunese-Tansi language switched spoken by people in Lembah Segar sub-district. Romaine’s (1995) theory is applied in this research to find the types of code-switching. To finding the functions of code-switching the researcher used Gumperz’s (1982) theory. The result of this study shows that the intra-sentential switching was the most common type of code-switching. Also, Interjection was the most function of code-switching used by people in Lembah Segar sub-district. This research gives a contribution in sociolinguistics fields. It is because the result of this study shows the relation of language and society.

Pragmatic Approach: A Study of Politeness Strategies in Pakistani Morning Shows

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of different politeness strategies in Pakistani Morning shows and to find out the highly frequently used politeness strategies. It further explored the factors affecting the use of different politeness strategies. The data was collected from two Pakistani morning shows “The Morning Show” and “Ek Nayee Subah with Farah”. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies were explored in the utterances of speakers. The frequency of using these strategies was counted and the factors influencing the speakers to choose these strategies were analysed. The findings revealed that the hosts and guests employed all of the fifteen sub-strategies of positive politeness frequently to maintain close relationship. However, the hosts, as the higher level power participants, also apply bald-on strategy to be authoritative with their assistants and the audience. Negative politeness and its ten sub-strategies were less frequently used by the speakers. Different power ranks also affected the choice of politeness strategies because participants having high power used bald-on record strategy but same power ranks showed the application of negative and positive politeness.

Communicative Fluency and the Experience of Stuttering: A Viewpoint.

Despite ambiguity in meaning and usage, "fluency" has played a central role in the understanding and treatment of developmental stuttering. The appropriateness of the term fluency in association with so-called fluency disorders, such as stuttering, has recently been questioned. The purpose of this article is to propose that fluency is best conceptualized as the efficiency of goal-directed action through cybernetic function. Spoken utterances are examples of sequences of action for the fulfillment of a hierarchy of nested and increasingly abstract social goals, including behaviors (e.g., introducing oneself) and values (e.g., being a sociable person). In contrast, some moments of speech disfluency, such as stuttering disfluencies, are inefficiencies in goal-directed action that may or may not hinder the fulfillment of higher level communicative behaviors and values, described here as communicative fluency. The concept of communicative fluency refers to the continual, reliable, and upward fulfillment of increasingly abstract social goals in the form of communicative actions, behaviors, and values. This expanded conceptualization of fluency beyond simply speech production has the potential to be a useful indicator of psychosocial well-being for individuals who stutter.

Strategy of kinship terms as a politeness model in maintaining social interaction: local values towards global harmony

Current research on kinship terms shows that variants of kinship terms used in the Bugis speech community interactional discourse show the difference in social status between speakers and listeners. However, only few studies have investigated the role of kinship terms, especially in promoting social harmony. This study aims to find the kinship terms of the Bugis speech community that are dominantly used in interaction, to identify the role of the kinship terms in creating unity and showing identity. This study focuses on the speaker's utterances toward the listener based on their power and solidarity. There were 120 native speakers who lived in Barru and Pinrang regencies participated in this study. The participants were classified into three age groups: 11–21, 22–43, and 44–65. The data collection was carried out using the Discourse Completion Tests (DCT). The DCT consists of five contexts that required participants to provide written utterances for two requests, one invitation, one suggestion, and one rebuking. Each of the context described the speaker's statement to older, coeval, and younger listeners with familiar or unfamiliar social distances. Data analysis used the AntConc 3.5.8 program whereas the interpretation used a sociopragmatic approach. The result shows that (1) There are five kinship and two address terms that are often used to extend the social interaction, namely: a) Ndi, b) Daéng, c) Sappo, d) Emma, e) Sillessureng, then the address terms Puang, and Silong. (2) Bugis speech communities achieve harmony and define self-identity through the strategy of choosing and placing the kinshp terms in their utterances. 3) The use of kinship terms based on the power and solidarity of speakers and listeners show the characteristic behaviour of Sipakatau, Siri na Pesse, and collectivity as Bugis identities. In conclusion, these findings help better understand the function and role of kinship terms in promoting social harmony and need significant support in the context of local language teaching and learning.

A syntax–lexicon trade-off in language production

Spoken language production involves selecting and assembling words and syntactic structures to convey one's message. Here we probe this process by analyzing natural language productions of individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and healthy individuals. Based on prior neuropsychological observations, we hypothesize that patients who have difficulty producing complex syntax might choose semantically richer words to make their meaning clear, whereas patients with lexicosemantic deficits may choose more complex syntax. To evaluate this hypothesis, we first introduce a frequency-based method for characterizing the syntactic complexity of naturally produced utterances. We then show that lexical and syntactic complexity, as measured by their frequencies, are negatively correlated in a large (n = 79) PPA population. We then show that this syntax-lexicon trade-off is also present in the utterances of healthy speakers (n = 99) taking part in a picture description task, suggesting that it may be a general property of the process by which humans turn thoughts into speech.

Detecting Deceptive Utterances Using Deep Pre-Trained Neural Networks

Lying is an integral part of everyday communication in both written and oral forms. Detecting lies is therefore essential and has many possible applications. Our study aims to investigate the performance of automated lie detection methods, namely the most recent breed of pre-trained transformer neural networks capable of processing the Polish language. We used a dataset of nearly 1500 true and false statements, half of which were transcripts and the other half written statements, originating from possibly the largest study of deception in the Polish language. Technically, the problem was posed as text classification. We found that models perform better on typed than spoken utterances. The best-performing model achieved an accuracy of 0.69, which is much higher than the human performance average of 0.56. For transcribed utterances, human performance was at 0.58 and the models reached 0.62. We also explored model interpretability based on integrated gradient to shed light on classifier decisions. Our observations highlight the role of first words and phrases in model decisions, but more work is needed to systematically explore the observed patterns.

What does it mean to wear a mask?

AbstractIf first-order empathy is the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view, then second-order empathy may be identified as the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view as including a view of Self. Considering that a hearer may choose between a first-order empathic and a second-order empathic interpretation of speaker utterances, second-order empathy introduces a pervasive indeterminacy in speaker-hearer interactions. The paper introduces this ambiguity potential in terms of the semiotics of face mask wearing during the corona pandemic, and then extrapolates the ensuing pattern of interpretative options to representative speech acts. The interaction between degree of empathy on one hand, and on the other the convergence or divergence of speaker and hearer beliefs is shown to yield six basic interpretative configurations: assertion, mistake, agreement, disagreement, irony, deception. Recognizing this ambiguity potential of second-order empathy is relevant for linguistic intersubjectivity research and post-Gricean pragmatics, and for the psychological theory of mind paradigm.

‘けど’로 종결되는 ‘미완결발화표현’ - politeness이론과의 연관성에 대하여 -

This study analyzes the relationship between the Suspended Clauses and the function of politeness theory in the free dialogue of the Meidai Dialogue Corpus that is a natural discourse. As a result, the function of providing information that fulfills the function of preface, topic presentation, and opinion expression by the speaker's utterance function of 'KEDO' has a function as the speaker's positive politeness strategy. In addition, it becomes clear that the function of requesting information, such as supplementing, correcting explanations, expressing caution, and requesting expressions, is related to the speaker's negative politeness strategy. In this way, the politeness discourse function by ‘KEDO’ seems to be at a higher level when compared with the basic utterance function ‘KEDO’ is uttered in discourse. Further analysis of the relationship with the politeness theory is the main issue for future discourse study, and it is necessary to deepen the consideration and enhance the study.

Perceptual asymmetry between pitch peaks and valleys

Perceiving pitch in spoken utterances is an important part of the speech comprehension process. Previous studies on pitch perception concentrated on ‘peaks’, neglecting ‘valleys’, thus making it difficult to know how generalisable the findings are. In two experiments, we took a factorial approach and contrasted the pitch movement direction associated with a stressed syllable (‘peaks’ vs. ‘valleys’), the turning point shape (sharp turn, 25, 100 ms plateau), the accent height (varied in one-semitone steps), and pitch levels by shifting the whole contour up or down. We employed different sentences and also non-speech stimuli. Results showed that listeners were better at discriminating the pitch height between ‘peaks’ compared to ‘valleys’. In particular, ‘valleys’ in the low level posed challenges. A long pitch plateau forming a flat turn at a ‘peak’ or ‘valley’ made a ‘peak’ sound higher and a ‘valley’ lower compared to a sharp turn or short plateau of the same height. Similar results were observed across speech and non-speech stimuli. The perceptual asymmetry may lead listeners to allocate more attention to ‘peaks’ than ‘valleys’ in speech processing, while the effect of listeners’ native language deserves further investigation.

Illocutionary Acts in President Joe Biden’s Speech

This article aimed to specify the kinds of illocutionary acts and defined the existence of illocutionary acts and their meaning in a speech to discover the outcomes of the maximum dominant kinds of illocutionary acts in President Joe Biden's speech. The research method used in completing this research becomes the descriptive qualitative method. In studying the data, the theory of Searle (1979) becomes used to determine the illocutionary act category of the speaker utterances. The tool used in collecting and analyzing the information was the speech video of President Joe Biden and the script acquired from the internet. The result of this research confirmed that there was 41 information and the researcher observed five types of the illocutionary act by using Searle’s theory in President Joe Biden’s speech which are assertive, directive, commisive, expressive, and declarative. The most dominant was assertive illocutionary act that implies stating, announcing, reporting, assertion, claiming, telling, informing, assuring, complaining, and concluding.