anaphoric third person pronouns and prosodic features as markers of cohesion in english spoken...
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Anaphoric Third Person Pronouns and Prosodic Features as Markers of
Cohesion in English Spoken Discourse: A Corpus Study
Cyril Auran
Laboratoire Parole et LangageCNRS UMR6057 - Université de Provence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
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“Oh no, not another study on anaphora …”
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Anaphora: a much studied phenomenon
numerous fields of research: syntax semantics pragmatics ang language philosophy psycholinguistics prosody
several related issues:
referent attribution referent accessibility discourse function
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“Well, yes, yet another one, but …”
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
This study focuses on:
discourse anaphora
anaphora and its role in the organisation of discourse
the interaction between anaphora and prosodic markers of discourse organisation
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“Well, yes, yet another one, but …”
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Central issue:
Interaction between discourse cohesion markers in British English
More precisely:
How do anaphoric pronouns influence resetting phenomena in the marking of discourse cohesion?
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Summary
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
3. Corpus study The Aix-MARSEC Corpus Data extraction and analysis Results and discussion
1.Views of discourse discourse as product and process a unified approach to discourse
Conclusions and perspectives
2. Cohesion, connectivity and coherence Different approaches to the unity of discourse Anaphoric pronouns and resetting phenomena as markers of
cohesion
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Part I: Two views of discourse
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
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Two views of discourse
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Linguistic studies on discourse tend to fall into two categories (Brown & Yule, 1983 ; Di Cristo et al., 2003) :
“text-as-product view” or “grammatical approach”
- discourse as a structured text
- main characteristic: cohesion of a set of sentences or utterances
“discourse-as-process” or “cognitive-pragmatic approach”
- focus on the elaboration and the processing of situated discourse
- main characteristic: coherence of the cognitive representations
triggered by discourse
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Two views of discourse
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Di Cristo et al. 2003
A “broad and unified approach to discourse”
Discourse analysis = study of the relations between forms and functions within an interpretative framework
Segmentation strategies:
• Grammatical units
• Conceptual units
• Discourse units
• Contextualisation activities
Clause
(Miller & Weinert, 1998)
both a formal and pragmatic entity
(evolution of “discourse memory” cf. Berrendonner & Reichler-Béguelin,
1989)
Topics
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Part II: Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
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Charolles (1988) (inspired by De Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981):
• several parameters used to account for discourse unity;
• cohesion: redefined as the “marking of relations between utterances or utterance constituents” (p. 53, our translation)
• connectivity: logical-semantic relations (marked by connectives) between propositions and speech acts
• coherence: interpretability of discourse: “Coherence is not a characteristic of texts [...]. The need for coherence, on the contrary, is a sort of a-priori mode of discourse reception”
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Different approaches but the same central issue:
discourse unity
Halliday & Hasan (1976):
• a text is characterised by its “texture”, based on “cohesion”;
• “cohesion” presented as a semantic concept relying on the interpretation of elements of the text
but
• focus on the (formal) linguistic expressions (“ties”)
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Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
In this study we focus on the marking of cohesion
through the use of:
Anaphoric third person pronouns and possessive adjectives
(he/she/they, him/her/them, his/her/their)
Pitch resetting phenomena
(high onset pitch values at the beginning of tone groups)
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Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Anaphoric pronouns and cohesion
Some of the most typical discourse cohesion marks:
• “endophoric personal referents” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976),
• members of “anaphoric chains” (cf. Chastain, 1975);
• expressions pointing to “highly accessible referents” (cf. for instance Ariel’s or Gundel’s work and Grosz & Sidner’s “Centering Theory”)
Anaphoric pronouns permit the thematic preservation (Danes, 1974) necessary for discourse to be cohesive
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• Topic-shifts in spoken discourse are prosodically marked as the boundaries of “structural units of spoken discourse which take the form of ‘speech paragraphs’ and have been called paratones” (Brown & Yule, 1983).
• No strict hierarchy view (cf. Hirst, 1998) but some kind of hierarchic structure (cf. the minor vs. major tone group opposition in the (MAR)SEC corpus).
Phonetic features:
• major unit beginning: extra high (F0) onset values
“pitch reset” or “resetting” (Brown & Yule, 1983; Wichmann, 2000; Couper-Kuhlen, 2001);
• major unit end: very low pitch, loss of amplitude, lengthy pauses (Brown and Yule, 1983) and creaky voice (Wichmann, 2000).
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Resettings and cohesion:
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Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
More anaphoric marks more cohesion
Lower resettings more cohesion
Effects of cohesion markers:
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Part III: Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
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• 55,000 words, 339 min. and 18 sec. • BBC 1980s recordings• 11 speaking styles• 53 (17 female and 36 male) speakers• Orthographic transcription• Prosodic annotation: 14 tonetic stress marks
• Automatic grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
• Automatic phoneme level alignment
• Automatic intonation annotation using the Momel-Intsint methodology
• 8 annotation levels aligned: phonemes, syllable constituents,
syllables, words, feet and rythmic units, tone groups.
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
The Aix-MARSEC Corpus
An evolution from the SEC and MARSEC corpora
SEC
Spoken English Corpus
MARSEC
Machine Readable SEC
Aix-MARSEC
• Alignment of words and tone groups with the signal
• Conversion of all the TSM to ASCII characters
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Data extraction and analysis (1)
Extraction of onset F0 values for all the tone groups which contained either a third person anaphoric pronoun or a
connective.
The whole of the Aix-MARSEC was used, except for the “E” type of recordings (“Daily Service”), the quality of which could
not guaranty accurate F0 detection).
Data extraction: Perl scripts on Aix-MARSEC Praat TextGrids
Data analysis: R software
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Momel methodology (Di Cristo & Hirst, 1986; Hirst et al., 2000)
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Data extraction and analysis (2)
Experimental design:
• one dependent variable: onset F0 value
• 2 independent variables:
- type of tone group (“major” vs. “minor”);
- anaphoric marker (“presence” vs. “absence”)
F0 values automatically measured on the modelled curve for the first stressed syllable within a tone group
(cf. Wichman, 2000)
Total: 12,272 values
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Data extraction and analysis (1)
Even after logarithmic transform, the distribution of onset F0 values significantly diverged from a normal distribution.
All ANOVA results were checked using two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests (KST) during transitive and
intransitive binary comparisons.
Raw distributionLog transformed
distributionNormal
distribution
Kurtosis 4.54 0.13 1
Skewness 1.73 0.5 0
Shapiro-Wilk normality test: W=0.7852 / p < 2.2e-16
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Results: Tone Group factor
Minor Major
100
200
300
400
500
Onset F0 values: tone group factor alone Significant effect
ANOVA: F=513.7, p<2e-16
4.5 ST difference
Hierarchically higher units have higher onset
values
Lower onset values correspond to minor (i.e. more cohesive)
units
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Results: Anaphora factor
-A t +A t -A T -A T
10
02
00
30
04
00
50
0
Onset F0 values: anaphoric and tone group factors Significant effect
ANOVA: F=54.94, p=1.32e-13
3.9 ST difference
Anaphoric markers of cohesion do influence resetting phenomena
« anaphoric » units have higher onset
values
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
A paradoxical effect ?
Discussion
Anaphora Higher resettings
Less cohesionMore cohesion
Constant resulting degree of cohesion
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Discussion
A closer look at resetting phenomena
Resetting phenomena
Discourse constraints
More cohesion
lower values
Planning and Production constraints
declination
higher values
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Discussion
Interaction with anaphora
Resetting phenomena
Anaphora
Anaphoric markers
Discourse constraints
More cohesion
lower values
Planning and Production constraints
declination
higher values
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Conclusions and perspectives
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
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Conclusion and Perspectives
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Conclusion …
• Markers of cohesion seem to interact in complex ways
• More particularly, anaphoric markers of cohesion influence resetting phenomena
This constitutes arguments in favor of a unified approach to discourse taking into account both:
• the cognitive and pragmatic processes involved in it and
• their actual realisations in its linguistic product
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Conclusion and Perspectives
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
… and perspectives
Delicate results:
• Statistical correlations / causality relations
• Numerous other factors
• Perspectives• Distinction between sentential and discourse markers• Speaker-normalised data• Other conceptions of resetting phenomena (as a differential value rather than an absolute one)• Analyses taking into account both anaphoric markers and connectives (cf. Auran & Hirst, submitted)
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Thank you for your attention !
;o)
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Presentation available from http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~auran/
Details on the Aix-MARSEC project available from
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~EPGA/
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Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
14 ASCII prosodic annotation symbols:
_ low level~ high level< step-down> step-up/’ (high) rise-fall
‘/ high\ high fall fall-rise/ high rise
, low rise‘ low fall,\ (low rise-fall – not used)\, low fall-rise* stressed but unaccented| minor intonation unit boundary|| major intonation unit boundary
(Roach, 1994)
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