Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, which has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account of. A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive which integrates concepts of normality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 2 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. In section 3 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 3.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 3.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 4, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
In this study we investigate the intonational characteristics of the four utterance types statement, wh-question, yes/no-question and declarative question. Readings of two German scripted dialogues were examined to ascertain characteristic features of the F0 contour for each utterance type. Final boundary tone, nuclear pitch accent, F0 offset, F0 onset, F0 range, and the slopes of a topline and a bottomline were determined for each utterance and compared for the four utterance types. Results show that for an average speaker, the final boundary tone, the F0 range, and the slope of the topline can be used to distinguish between the four utterance types. However, speakers may deviate from this pattern and exploit other intonational means to distinguish certain utterance types or choose not to mark a syntactic difference at all.
The goal of the MULI (MUltiLingual Information structure) project is to empirically analyse information structure in German and English newspaper texts. In contrast to other projects in which information structure is annotated and investigated (e.g. in the Prague Dependency Treebank, which mirrors the basic information about the topic-focus articulation of the sentence), we do not annotate theory-biased categories like topic-focus or theme-rheme. Trying to be as theory-independent as possible, we annotate those features which are relevant to information structure and on the basis of which typical patterns, co-occurrences or correlations can be determined. We distinguish between three annotation levels: syntax, discourse and prosody. The data is based on the TIGER Corpus for German and the Penn Treebank for English, since the existing information on part-of-speech and syntactic structure can be re-used for our purposes. The actual annotation of an English example sequence illustrates our choice of categories on each level. Their combination offers the possibility to investigate how information structure is realised and can be interpreted.
Lexical-semantic theories often suffer from the imprecision of the concepts they employ in their representations. This leads to a considerable decrease in empirical strength by inviting circular argumentation. A demonstration of how to go about overcoming such shortcomings will be carried out, using the lexical semantic concept of "punctuality" as an example. Firstly, I will argue that the distinction between punctuality and durativity plays a crucial role for the explanation of a wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. Secondly, I will discuss methodological issues involved in arriving at a more precise definition of punctuality and, finally, the notion of "punctuality" will be given an interpretation on the basis of extensive consultation of research on cognitive time concepts.
The current paper presents a corpus containing 35 dialogues of spontaneously spoken southern German, including half an hour of articulography for 13 of the speakers. Speakers were seated in separate recording chambers, mimicking a telephone call, and recorded on individual audio channels. The corpus provides manually corrected word boundaries and automatically aligned segment boundaries. Annotations are provided in the Praat format. In addition to audio recordings, speakers filled out a detailed questionnaire, assessing among others their audio-visual consumption habits.
The naturalness of synthetic speech depends strongly on the prediction of appropriate prosody. For the present study the original annotation of the German speech database “Kiel Corpus of Read Speech” was extended automatically with syntactic features, word frequency, and syllable boundaries. Several classification and regression trees for predicting symbolic prosody features, postlexical phonological processes, duration, and F0 were trained on this database. The perceptual evaluation showed that the overall perceptual quality of the German text-to-speech system MARY can be significantly improved by training all models that contribute to prosody prediction on the same database. Furthermore, it showed that the error introduced by symbolic prosody prediction perceptually equals the error produced by a direct method that does not exploit any symbolic prosody features.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
As can be shown for English data, the assimilation of the alveolar stop can result from an increased gestural overlap of the following oral closure gesture. Our experiment with German synthetic speech showed similar results. Further, it suggests that it is neccessary to complete the gestural specification of the glottal state. A voiced stop should be represented not only by an oral gesture, but by a glottal one as well.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in listeners' preferences. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of symbolic strings which were either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic string is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, "post-lexical" segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to calculate an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.