Degrees of Activation and Focus-Background Structure in Spontaneous Speech - The Relation between Prosodic Marking and Syntactic and Semantic Structure Building (DASS)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Martine Grice
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2009 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 144877651

The project aims to shed light on the relation between information structure and its expression in spoken language, taking German as our target language. In particular, we shall investigate the expression of informativeness, a concept which subsumes both the level of cognitive activation (i.e. information status) of a constituent and its place in the focus-background structure. The discourse constituents we plan to examine comprise not only referential lexical categories but also functional categories as the core building blocks of syntactic structure. We shall relate the semantic and syntactic correlates of informativeness that can be gained purely from the text to prosodic aspects of the speech signal, so as to estimate the extent of each contribution to the marking of information structure. Moreover, we shall supplement our autosegmentalmetrical tonal analysis (GToBI) with phonetic measures of the F0 contour, gained from annotations placed by hand and from semi-automatic labelling. Our analyses will be carried out on diverse speech material, ranging from more controlled laboratory speech through task-oriented dialogues to fully spontaneous speech and will include an evaluation of the contextual appropriateness of selected realisations by means of listening experiments. Finally, we shall compile a database in which the different levels of analysis are integrated using multi-layer annotation aligned with speech files.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants