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SUMMARY:Assigning prosodic prominence in the English 'noun-noun' - Melanie
  Bell\, RCEAL
DTSTART:20101123T160000Z
DTEND:20101123T173000Z
UID:TALK27067@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Chris Cummins
DESCRIPTION:In West Germanic\, noun noun compounds are generally 'left str
 essed'\, i.e. spoken with\nprominence on the first element. However\, Pres
 ent-day English has two common patterns:\nwhile some noun noun combination
 s (NNs) show the expected prominence on the first\nconstituent\, e.g. 'tab
 le lamp\, others receive prominence on the second\, e.g. silk 'shirt. In\n
 recent corpus studies by Plag et al. (2007) and Plag (2010)\, the most rel
 iable predictors\nof prominence in a given NN were found to be the identit
 ies of the constituents: for\nexample\, 'table lamp might be assigned prom
 inence by analogy with 'table mat\, 'table top etc.\n\nIn this talk\, I wi
 ll build on Plag's work by considering why certain constituents should\npr
 edispose a compound to right or left prominence. Using data from the Briti
 sh National\nCorpus (BNC) and from a large scale production experiment\, I
  will present a probabilistic\nmodel of prominence assignment that has ver
 y good predictive accuracy. The model has\nthree main elements: the semant
 ics of the constituents and the compound as a whole\, the\nrelative inform
 ativeness of the two constituents\, and the length of the second constitue
 nt.\nThis model\, in particular the contribution of informativeness to pro
 minence assignment\,\nlends support to a view of the lexicon as a highly s
 tructured network in which both whole\ncompounds and their constituents ar
 e stored. In addition\, the results can be interpreted as\nevidence for an
  accentual theory of compound stress.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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