Project Summary
An essential aspect of comprehending language, in written or spoken modalities, is interpreting the status of a linguistic entity relative to the discourse or narrative context. Cross-linguistically, prosody and the structural organization of information provide different means of encoding the discourse status of a word. Whereas most languages are believed to deploy one prominence cue type to the exclusion of the other, some ‘free word order’ languages (e.g., Greek, Georgian, Ukranian, Finnish) have been reported to deploy both prosodic and structural encoding of prominence. This work investigates the relationship between the simultaneously available structural and prosodic means of encoding prominence in Russian and Hindi, free word order languages. Our goal is to parameterize perceived prominence in Russian and Hindi and understand which factors guide naïve readers’ or listeners’ perception of a word as prominent in a discourse or narrative.
More information
Luchkina, T. & Cole, J. S. (2013). “Routes to prominence in free word order discourse.” In Proceedings of the 2013 Prosody-Discourse Interface Conference (IDP 2013), University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Luchkina, T., Cole, J., Jyothi, P., Puri, V. Prosodic and structural correlates of perceived prominence in Russian and Hindi. In Proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS).
Luchkina T. and Cole, J. Prosodic Encoding in Read Discourse in Russian. Revision requested by Phonetica.