Research Groups: April 1-5

Tuesday, April 2, 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM, PT266
Computational Linguistics Group, Department of Computer Science
Jenny Xie (BA): "Text-based inference of moral sentiment change."

Friday, April 5, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, SS4043
Psycholinguistics Group
Cassandra Jacobs (postdoc, Department of Psychology): "A unifying account of holistic and compositional phrase representations."
Comprehenders and speakers find producing familiar combinations of words easier than producing similar, less familiar combinations (Arnon and Snider 2010; Arnon and Cohen Priva 2014; Bannard and Matthews 2008; Siyanova-Chanturia, Conklin, and Van Heuven 2011), which has led to the proposal that phrases are retrieved as chunks from memory (Janssen and Barber 2012), running counter to many words-and-rules accounts of phrases (Halle and Marantz, 1994). I present evidence from free recall experiments (Jacobs, Dell, and Bannard 2017) that the production of literal phrases (e.g. 'alcoholic beverages') is in fact quite incremental (Ferreira and Swets 2002), suggesting that retrieval of phrases is not all-or-none. Then I present a simple connectionist model that shows that phrase frequency effects can arise without needing to posit the existence of phrase categories in memory.

Friday, April 5, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, SS560A
Language Variation and Change Research Group
Guest speaker: Ai Taniguchi (Carleton University): "Non-redundancy, social meaning, and role language."

Friday, April 5, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM, SS560A
Phonology Research Group
Presentation by Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.).

Friday, April 5, 1:00 PM-2:30 PM, SS560A
Semantics Research Group
Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.): "The prosodic realisation of affective and epistemic stance in Hungarian rise-fall interrogatives."
Rising declaratives are realized in Hungarian as rise-fall interrogatives (RFIs) exhibiting a rise-fall pitch contour on each Accentual Phrase of the utterance. RFIs can be used in contexts where the speaker is somewhat uncertain about the truth of p, the proposition conveyed by the utterance, this is called a confirmative use (Poschmann 2008). However they are also felicitous in contexts where the speaker is certain about (i.e. fully committed to) p but uses the RFI to convey affective stance, i.e. a positive or negative attitude towards p. This is called the echoic use, following Poschmann (2008). The goal of the present paper is to investigate the prosodic realisation of RFIs to test for the effects of epistemic and affective stance. To achieve this, string-identical RFIs were examined in different contexts. The contexts favoured either a confirmative question reading or an echoic reading, the latter being embedded in contexts that made the speakers convey positive or negative affect. Our results show that both epistemic and affective stance has an effect on the prosody of RFIs. For epistemic stance, the position of the maximum f0 on verbs is realised later in neutral contexts than in non-neutral (positive or negative) ones. Affective stance correlates with the scaling of the APs: While there is a downward drift of mean f0 values of the accents of post-verbal constituents under all three conditions, positive affect is distinguished by a significantly greater downstep of the accented syllables of the post-verbal APs in relation to the accented syllable of the verb, while negative affect is not significantly different in this respect from neutral affect.