Head (linguistics)

Abstract: People naturally move their heads when they speak, and our study shows that this rhythmic head motion conveys linguistic information. Three-dimensional head and face motion and the acoustics of a talker producing Japanese sentences were recorded and analyzed. The head movement correlated strongly with the pitch (fundamental frequency) and amplitude of the talker's voice. In a perception study, Japanese subjects viewed realistic talking-head animations based on these movement recordings in a speech-in-noise task. The animations allowed the head motion to be manipulated without changing other characteristics of the visual or acoustic speech. Subjects correctly identified more syllables when natural head motion was present in the animation than when it was eliminated or distorted. These results suggest that nonverbal gestures such as head movements play a more direct role in the perception of speech than previously known.

Abstract: This thesis studies movement operations in natural languages. It is observed that certain heads – C° , v°, and, in most languages, P° – cannot be stranded; the complements of these heads never move without pied-piping the heads in question. This is surprising since (a) extraction out of CP, vP, and PP is possible in principle and (b) the complement categories of these heads, TP, VP, and DP or PP, are movable. Evidence for the more contentious of these claims is provided in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 4 also investigates the ramifications of these facts for theories of adposition stranding. All heads in question have independently been argued to project what Chomsky (2000) calls ‘phases’. The generalization is that phase heads cannot be stranded. Chapter 2 derives the ban against stranding phase heads within a derivational model of the grammar. The effect of phases on successive cyclicity is the following: To be licit, movement out of a phase must pass through the specifier position of that phase. The idea of the account is that every step of movement must establish a relation between the moved item and some other element in the phrase marker which is in a well-defined sense closer than the relation they were in prior to movement. Movement from complement to specifier position within the same phrase never achieves this. In fact, any movement within the same phrase is in effect too short to achieve this. There are then well-defined anti-locality effects, which fallout from considerations of local economy. The ban against stranding phase heads now follows. A category can leave its containing phase only by passing through its specifier position. Since complements cannot reach the specifier position in the same phrase, the complements of phase heads cannot move away. Head Movement is prohibited by the same economy based reasoning. Chapter 5 focuses on Head Movement, advocating a version of Brody’s (2000) Mirror Theory. In contrast to standard theories of Head Movement, Mirror Theory predicts what looks like downward Head Movement to be possible. Data from VP-ellipsis in English show that this prediction of Mirror Theory is correct.

Abstract: The ToBI conventions are a consensus system for labelling spoken utterances that segregates tags for different types of phonological events and structures into parallel quasi- independent tiers. Most notably, the conventions specify a way to mark the phonologically contrastive intonational events (Tones) separately from the hierarchy of inter-word junctures (Break-Indices) with which some of these pitch events are associated. The original ToBI conventions are language-specific; they were intended to cover the phonologically contrastive tones of Mainstream American English. However, other annotation conventions based on the same general design principles have now been proposed for several other English varieties and for a number of other languages. This function of the original ToBI system as a general model for developing language-specific annotation conventions makes it possible to compare prosodic systems across languages using a common vocabulary, and to search for universals. This chapter is an overview of the original ToBI system. It reviews the design of the original system and its foundations in basic and applied research. It describes the inter-disciplinary community of users and uses for which the system was intended, and it outlines how the consensus model of American English intonation and inter-word juncture was achieved by finding points of useful intersection among the research interests and knowledge embodied in this community. It thus identifies the practical principles for designing prosodic annotation conventions that emerged in the course of developing, testing, and using this particular system. p. 33 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Figure 2.1. Audio waveform, F0 contour, and MAE_ToBI xlabel windows for utterance Okay... They have a couple flights. p. 34 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Figure 2.2. Audio waveform, F0 contour, and MAE_ToBI xlabel windows for utterance The Pentagon reports fighting in six southern Iraqi cities. p. 35 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Figure 2.3. Audio waveform, F0 contour, and MAE_ToBI xlabel windows for utterance Uhh... Quincy. Could I have the number to uh ... Shore Cab? p. 36 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. Notes 1 In accounts by British language teachers and phoneticians before the 1980s, the ‘nucleus’ of an intonation contour was modeled as a holistic dynamic tonal event governing the part of the contour beginning at the most stressed syllable. When this nucleus occurs far from the end of the contour, then, the pitch pattern on material after the nuclear stress is called the ‘tail’. The general shape of the intonation contour over accented syllables before the nucleus is then the ‘head’. 2 Note that there are only four basic break index values, ordered from 0 to 4, with a “hole” at 2. In the original Price et al. (1991) use of break indices, the value 2 represented a perceived boundary strength intermediate between a normal word boundary and a larger phrase boundary, and was used to mark a number of imprecisely-defined phenomena. The ToBI system restricts the use of this label to an explicit subset of these phenomena — namely, inter-word junctures where there is ambiguity between a 1 and a 3 either because there is a phrase tone without the duration lengthening appropriate to a 3, or a lengthening appropriate to a 3 but no phrase tone. This means that ToBI labels do not recognise a prosodic constituent comparable to Selkirk’s (1995) “Minor Phrase” unless this is equated with Beckman and Pierrehumbert’s (1986) tonally marked “intermediate phrase”. Labellers who postulate and perceive a constituent boundary that is larger than a “Prosodic Word” but smaller than the lowest intonationally marked constituent are encouraged to mark these events in a comments tier (see Section 2.5). 3 The break index value ‘0’ was intended to mark a boundary between two orthographic words which is perceived to be considerably reduced in strength from a “normal” word boundary. The MAE_ToBI conventions suggest that this sense of close grouping should be associated with such segmental sandhi phenomena as the flapping of final /t/ in utterances such as Got a dime?, the palatalisation of final /t/ in We sent you the cheque., and so on — i.e., phenomena that have been cited by phonologists as evidence of multi-word prosodic constituents such as the “Prosodic Word” or a “Clitic Group” (see Hayes 1989, Selkirk 1995, Peperkamp 1999, and the references they cite for discussion of different theoretical views of these constituents). A break index value of ‘1’ is then a “normal” word boundary. A more precise definition of these levels is desirable, but not yet feasible, because corpus research on such phenomena as flapping and palatalisation lags considerably behind research on the phonetic correlates of prosodic grouping at the intermediate phrase and intonational phrase level. 4 This meant omitting break indices 5 and 6 from the Price et al. (1991) model, since these two break index values could not be identified with a categorically marked level of prosodic structure such as the intonational phrase. Rather, they were intended to encode the percept of (possibly recursive) higher-level groupings above the intonational phrase. 5 EMU is a set of tools for creating and analyzing speech databases. It includes a powerful search engine that can find segments and events based on their sequential and hierarchical contexts. For example, if a MAE spoken language database has associated word labels, and if those labels are hierarchically organised into intermediate phrases and intonation phrases, with associated MAE_ToBI labels, it is straightforward to query for every instance in the database of a word with an associated L+H* pitch accent that is also the last accent in its intermediate phrase and followed by a !Hphrase accent. The EMU readable version of the Guidelines to ToBI Labelling is available at http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/emu/emu-tobi.shtml. p. 37 — Preprint draft of Chapter 2 of Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) (in press) Prosodic models and transcription: Towards prosodic typology. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite without permission of authors and editor. 6 We note that no site seems to have rigorously adopted the practice envisioned by the original ToBI group of marking silences automatically, on the Misc tier. 7 The intermediate phrase in Greek, like the intermediate phrase in English, is defined by the presence of a phrase accent after the nuclear pitch accent (see Grice, Ladd, & Arvaniti, 1999, for discussion of the cross-linguistic applicability of this concept). Thus, the use of 2 as a marker of two types of tones-breaks mismatch in English has resulted in different numbers correspond to levels that are defined in the same way in the two languages. 8 See http://www.georgetown.edu/luperfoy/Discourse-Treebank/dri-home.html. 9 See http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ame_tobi/annotation_conventions.html for this utterance. Hirst (1999: 73) reports that the sliding head “has been described as typical of Scottish accents” and suggests that it “is probably gaining ground throughout England possibly due to the influence of American speech where the pattern is very common”. Our impression is that it is more characteristic of Australian and New Zealand varieties, particularly those with a strong Scottish English substrate, than it is of mainstream American varieties — see, e.g., Fletcher and Harrington 1996; Ainsworth 2000.