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This chapter addresses the debate concerning the status of nonmanuals (head, face, body) as prosodic or not by exploring in detail how prosody is structured in speech and what might be parallels and differences in sign. Prosody is divided into two parts, rhythmic phrasing (timing, syllables, stress), and intonation. To maximize accessibility, in each part, an introduction to what is known for speech is presented, followed by what is known and/or claimed for sign languages. With the exception of the internal structure of syllables, sign languages are very similar to spoken languages in the rhythmic domain. In the intonational domain, the parallels are less strong, in part because analogies of nonmanual functions to spoken intonation tend to be based on older/simpler models of intonation. There needs to be much more detailed research on sign languages to catch up with the recent research on spoken intonation.

This book examines the diverse prosody of compound nouns in Kansai Japanese, with a special focus on a class of compounds with particularly variable prosody, whose unique prosody is potentially endangered due to their structure and influence from Tokyo Japanese. These compounds serve as important evidence for recursion in prosodic structure in theories of the syntax-prosody interface, as they simultaneously resemble not only other compound words but also non-compound phrases, making them valuable test cases for compound prosodic structure. This book discusses potential reasons for these compounds' prosodic variabilty and what may condition their unique prosody, based on results from novel fieldwork. A unified account of compound prosody in Kansai and three other Japanese dialects is also presented

The relevance of the study of the prosodic structure of speech acts of abuse is due to the tasks faced by an expert linguist in the study of oral discourse. The present study is experimental; in its course, for the first time, a set of universal and individual prosodic means used when pronouncing a conflict statement with signs of verbal aggression is considered. The purpose of the article is to identify the prosodic characteristics of abuse as an illocutionary act and study the features of suprasegmental units of speech containing invective elements, including those in the structure of utterances not limited by the semantics and pragmatics of abuse. An interdisciplinary approach is applied to analyzing spoken texts based on the appeal to acoustic, auditory, and linguistic analysis methods. The study's object was unique, authentic utterances: spontaneous sounding speech qualified by the preliminary investigation authorities as a public abuse to a government official. As a result of the study, we identified suprasegmental units that characterize the speakers' invective speech. The prosodic components of the speech act of abuse within the framework of the utterance include the ascending-descending nature of the frequency of the main tone and increased dynamic characteristics of speech. Statements containing signs of abuse are often carriers of other goals. Prosodic accents in such utterances vary and depend on the leading speech purpose of the utterance. Together with their addresser's speech goal, the analyzed utterances' propositional content is manifested by a particular prosodic structure. The intonational model of such statements when solving diagnostic expert problems acts as one of the indicators of a subjective negative assessment, which contributes to identifying a speech act as an abuse. ; Актуальность изучения просодической структуры речевых актов оскорбления обусловлена задачами, стоящими перед экспертами-лингвистами при исследовании устного дискурса. Настоящая работа носит экспериментальный характер; впервые рассмотрен набор универсальных и индивидуальных просодических средств, используемых при произнесении конфликтного высказывания с признаками вербальной агрессии. Цель статьи – выявление просодических характеристик оскорбления как иллокутивного акта, в частности изучение особенностей надсегментных единиц речи, содержащей инвективные элементы, в том числе в структуре высказываний, не ограниченных семантикой и прагматикой оскорбления. К анализу звучащих текстов применен междисциплинарный подход, основанный на методах акустического, аудитивного и лингвистического анализа. Объектами исследования являлись уникальные аутентичные высказывания, представляющие собой спонтанную звучащую речь и квалифицированные органами предварительного следствия как публичное оскорбление представителя власти. В результате выявлены суперсегментные единицы, характеризующие инвективную речь дикторов. К просодическим компонентам речевого акта оскорбления в рамках высказывания относится восходяще-нисходящий характер частоты основного тона, а также повышенные динамические характеристики речи. Высказывания, содержащие признаки оскорбления, нередко являются носителями и иных целеустановок. Просодические акценты в таких высказываниях изменяются в зависимости от речевой цели высказывания. Пропозициональное содержание анализируемых высказываний в совокупности с реализуемой их адресантом речевой целью манифестировано определенной просодической структурой. Интонационная модель таких высказываний выступает при решении диагностических экспертных задач в качестве одного из показателей субъективной отрицательной оценки, что способствует идентификации речевого действия как оскорбления.

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Comunicació presentada a: The 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2017), celebrada a Estocolm, Suència, del 20 al 24 d'agost de 2017. ; This work aims to explore the correlation between the discourse structure of a spoken monologue and its prosody by predicting discourse relations from different prosodic attributes. For this purpose, a corpus of semi-spontaneous monologues in English has been automatically annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, which models coherence in text via rhetorical relations. From corresponding audio files, prosodic features such as pitch, intensity, and speech rate have been extracted from different contexts of a relation. Supervised classification tasks using Support Vector Machines have been performed to find relationships between prosodic features and rhetorical relations. Preliminary results show that intensity combined with other features extracted from intra- and intersegmental environments is the feature with the highest predictability for a discourse relation. The prediction of rhetorical relations from prosodic features and their combinations is straightforwardly applicable to several tasks such as speech understanding or generation. Moreover, the knowledge of how rhetorical relations should be marked in terms of prosody will serve as a basis to improve speech synthesis applications and make voices sound more natural and expressive. ; This work is part of the KRISTINA project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement number 645012. The second author is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through the Ramón y Cajal program. The third and fourth authors are partially funded by ANPCYT PICT 2014-1561, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Material Command, USAF under Award No. FA9550-15-1-0055.

This paper is aimed at illustrating the phenomenon of compositionality in the system of the communicative meanings and their prosodic means of expression. The regularity in combining the communicative meanings is illustrated by the compositions of 1) the illocutionary meanings, 2) the meaning of discourse incompleteness, and 3) the meaning of communicative contrast. It is demonstrated that discourse incompleteness functions not only within the row of statements which constitute a connected text, but also within sequences of questions, including the contrastive contexts. The systemic method of analysis has been applied therefore to the description of a fragment of linguistic pragmatics. The material for the analysis is a minor working corpus of the sound speech specifically set up for this investigation on the basis the Russian National corpus.

Abstract. Recent work on object shift in the Scandinavian languages has rejected earlier syntactic analyses in favor of prosodic or information‐structural accounts. In this paper I present new evidence from Danish copular clauses that argues against a prosodic analysis of the phenomenon. In particular, I show that specificational copular clauses do not allow object shift and that this fact cannot be accounted for in prosodic terms. I propose that the observed lack of object shift is due to the fixed information structure of specificational clauses: the object is invariably focused and that is what prevents it from shifting. This account dovetails with the focus‐based analysis of object shift proposed byHolmberg (1999), and is also compatible with the syntactic analysis developed bySells (2001).

In previous work, we examined the role of some prosodic features in structuring spoken discourse. In this paper, we explore monologue in political discourse, and attempt to link these prosodic cues to the speaker's argumentative goals. The prosodic analysis is carried out in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework applied to Buenos Aires Spanish. The pragmatic analysis follows Relevance Theory. Tonal configurations guide the hearers to those parts of the discourse the speaker wants the audience to consider highly relevant. DOI:10.28998/2317-9945.2013v2n52p227-247

Comunicació presentada a: The 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2017), celebrada a Estocolm, Suència, del 20 al 24 d'agost de 2017. ; This paper presents a demonstration of a stochastic prosody tool for enrichment of synthesized speech using SSML prosody tags applied over hierarchical thematicity spans in the context of a CTS application. The motivation for using hierarchical thematicity is exemplified, together with the capabilities of the module to generate a variety of SSML prosody tags within a controlled range of values depending on the input thematicity label. ; This work is part of the KRISTINA project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement number H2020-RIA-645012. It has been also partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015- 0502). The second author is partially funded by the Ramón y Cajal program.

Abstract English‐learning 7.5‐month‐olds are heavily biased to perceive stressed syllables as word onsets. By 11 months, however, infants begin segmenting non‐initially stressed words from speech. Using the same artificial language methodology as

Johnson and Jusczyk (2001

), we explored the possibility that the emergence of this ability is linked to a decreased reliance on prosodic cues to word boundaries accompanied by an increased reliance on syllable distribution cues. In a baseline study, where only statistical cues to word boundaries were present, infants exhibited a familiarity preference for statistical words. When conflicting stress cues were added to the speech stream, infants exhibited a familiarity preference for stress as opposed to statistical words. This was interpreted as evidence that 11‐month‐olds weight stress cues to word boundaries more heavily than statistical cues. Experiment 2 further investigated these results with a language containing convergent cues to word boundaries. The results of Experiment 2 were not conclusive. A third experiment using new stimuli and a different experimental design supported the conclusion that 11‐month‐olds rely more heavily on prosodic than statistical cues to word boundaries. We conclude that the emergence of the ability to segment non‐initially stressed words from speech is not likely to be tied to an increased reliance on syllable distribution cues relative to stress cues, but instead may emerge due to an increased reliance on and integration of a broad array of segmentation cues.

Abstract
The study focuses on the prosody of Standard Chinese in communication in correlation with gender of speakers. In the field of Standard Chinese prosody is built on the research work done by Oldřich Švarný, who established the system of prosodic transcription and analysis. The connection with the gender of the speakers is completely new and unique. This article uses results of the analysis of SC language corpus transcribed by prosodic transcription and endeavour to find a connection between obtained results and gendered influences on prosodic (suprasegmental) level of language. Basic prosodic phenomena observed here are prosodic word syllable number, speech rate, syllable accentual prominence and the frequency of rhythmic sequence types. The results clearly show there is a connection between gender of the speaker and the prosodic realization of his/her speech.