Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 10 of 10 for “"contrastive focus"”.
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Understanding Doubly Center-Embedded Sentences Through Contrastive Focus
… in English. Lexically identical sentences with contrastive emphasis on NP1, NP2, or VP1, and a baseline version for comparison, were read aloud for recording and judged for comprehensibility. Contrast on NP2 and VP1 yielded higher comprehensibility judgments compared to baseline than contrast on …
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Counterfactuals in Context: Felicity conditions for counterfactual conditionals containing proper names
… an individual are counterfactually posited using contrastive focus in either the antecedent or consequent clause. The felicity conditions proposed are an adaptation of Heim's (1992) CCP Semantics into Kratzer's (1981) truth conditions for counterfactual conditionals in which the partition function …
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Acoustic cues for the perception of the information status of words in speech
… English, speakers highlight new or semantically focused information by prosodic enhancement–greater pitch, greater duration, and greater intensity–as compared to words that are already given in, or inferable from the prior discourse context. If speakers signal discourse meaning in their speech, …
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L2 acquisition of nuclear accent
… in English and can only move leftwards to mark contrastive focus (e.g. Zubizarreta, 1998). Instead of employing prosodic means, Spanish relies on word order inversions to mark some of the distinctions English marks prosodically. By including these two languages, these two studies are able to …
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Focal prominence in tone languages: A case study of three Chinese languages
… of pitch and duration in response to different focus types, including wh-focus, contrastive focus, ‘EVEN’ focus and broad focus. The modulations of pitch contour also illuminate the distinct tonal targets associated with each tonal category. Empirical findings presented in Chapter 3, 5 and 6 are …
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Application of generative models in speech processing tasks
… capture the semantic variations. Experiments on contrastive focus verify TEReTA's ability in semantics modeling. BaWN is a neural network based algorithm for single-channel enhancement. The biggest challenges of the neural network based speech enhancement algorithm are the poor generalizability …
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Prosodic prominence in English
… context. Prominent words are usually new or contrastive information, while nonprominent words are given or noncontrastive information. This dissertation addresses English prominence in two separate studies. The first study investigates the prosodic prominence in relation to pitch accents, …
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Discourse-Conditioned Wh-Placement in Natural Language
… wh-placement in natural languages, focusing on wh-ex-situ in wh-in-situ languages (Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Turkish) and wh-in-situ in wh-movement languages (Greek, Italian, French, Spanish). Standing at the interface of syntax and information structure, I …
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Putting PPs into order - Understanding prepositionality in the predominantly postpositional language Lule Sami
… parts of Northern Norway and Sweden. The study focuses on the factors underlying prepositional occurrences in this predominantly postpositional language. It is mainly based on spoken data containing more than 4,000 occurrences of adpositions, elicited from eleven native speakers of Lule Sami in …