Anaphoric Third Person Pronouns and Prosodic Features as Markers of Cohesion in English Spoken Discourse: A Corpus Study Cyril Auran Laboratoire Parole et Langage CNRS UMR6057 - Université de Provence [email protected]6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
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Anaphoric Third Person Pronouns and Prosodic Features as Markers of Cohesion in English Spoken Discourse: A Corpus Study Cyril Auran Laboratoire Parole.
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Anaphoric Third Person Pronouns and Prosodic Features as Markers of
Cohesion in English Spoken Discourse: A Corpus Study
Cyril Auran
Laboratoire Parole et LangageCNRS UMR6057 - Université de Provence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
“Oh no, not another study on anaphora …”
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Anaphora: a much studied phenomenon
numerous fields of research: syntax semantics pragmatics ang language philosophy psycholinguistics prosody
several related issues:
referent attribution referent accessibility discourse function
“Well, yes, yet another one, but …”
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
This study focuses on:
discourse anaphora
anaphora and its role in the organisation of discourse
the interaction between anaphora and prosodic markers of discourse organisation
“Well, yes, yet another one, but …”
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Central issue:
Interaction between discourse cohesion markers in British English
More precisely:
How do anaphoric pronouns influence resetting phenomena in the marking of discourse cohesion?
Summary
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
3. Corpus study The Aix-MARSEC Corpus Data extraction and analysis Results and discussion
1.Views of discourse discourse as product and process a unified approach to discourse
Conclusions and perspectives
2. Cohesion, connectivity and coherence Different approaches to the unity of discourse Anaphoric pronouns and resetting phenomena as markers of
cohesion
Part I: Two views of discourse
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Two views of discourse
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Linguistic studies on discourse tend to fall into two categories (Brown & Yule, 1983 ; Di Cristo et al., 2003) :
“text-as-product view” or “grammatical approach”
- discourse as a structured text
- main characteristic: cohesion of a set of sentences or utterances
“discourse-as-process” or “cognitive-pragmatic approach”
- focus on the elaboration and the processing of situated discourse
- main characteristic: coherence of the cognitive representations
triggered by discourse
Two views of discourse
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Di Cristo et al. 2003
A “broad and unified approach to discourse”
Discourse analysis = study of the relations between forms and functions within an interpretative framework
Segmentation strategies:
• Grammatical units
• Conceptual units
• Discourse units
• Contextualisation activities
Clause
(Miller & Weinert, 1998)
both a formal and pragmatic entity
(evolution of “discourse memory” cf. Berrendonner & Reichler-Béguelin,
1989)
Topics
Part II: Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Charolles (1988) (inspired by De Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981):
• several parameters used to account for discourse unity;
• cohesion: redefined as the “marking of relations between utterances or utterance constituents” (p. 53, our translation)
• connectivity: logical-semantic relations (marked by connectives) between propositions and speech acts
• coherence: interpretability of discourse: “Coherence is not a characteristic of texts [...]. The need for coherence, on the contrary, is a sort of a-priori mode of discourse reception”
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Different approaches but the same central issue:
discourse unity
Halliday & Hasan (1976):
• a text is characterised by its “texture”, based on “cohesion”;
• “cohesion” presented as a semantic concept relying on the interpretation of elements of the text
but
• focus on the (formal) linguistic expressions (“ties”)
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
In this study we focus on the marking of cohesion
through the use of:
Anaphoric third person pronouns and possessive adjectives
(he/she/they, him/her/them, his/her/their)
Pitch resetting phenomena
(high onset pitch values at the beginning of tone groups)
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Anaphoric pronouns and cohesion
Some of the most typical discourse cohesion marks:
• “endophoric personal referents” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976),
• members of “anaphoric chains” (cf. Chastain, 1975);
• expressions pointing to “highly accessible referents” (cf. for instance Ariel’s or Gundel’s work and Grosz & Sidner’s “Centering Theory”)
Anaphoric pronouns permit the thematic preservation (Danes, 1974) necessary for discourse to be cohesive
• Topic-shifts in spoken discourse are prosodically marked as the boundaries of “structural units of spoken discourse which take the form of ‘speech paragraphs’ and have been called paratones” (Brown & Yule, 1983).
• No strict hierarchy view (cf. Hirst, 1998) but some kind of hierarchic structure (cf. the minor vs. major tone group opposition in the (MAR)SEC corpus).
Phonetic features:
• major unit beginning: extra high (F0) onset values
• major unit end: very low pitch, loss of amplitude, lengthy pauses (Brown and Yule, 1983) and creaky voice (Wichmann, 2000).
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Resettings and cohesion:
Cohesion, connectivity and coherence
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
More anaphoric marks more cohesion
Lower resettings more cohesion
Effects of cohesion markers:
Part III: Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
• 55,000 words, 339 min. and 18 sec. • BBC 1980s recordings• 11 speaking styles• 53 (17 female and 36 male) speakers• Orthographic transcription• Prosodic annotation: 14 tonetic stress marks
• Automatic grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
• Automatic phoneme level alignment
• Automatic intonation annotation using the Momel-Intsint methodology
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Data extraction and analysis (2)
Experimental design:
• one dependent variable: onset F0 value
• 2 independent variables:
- type of tone group (“major” vs. “minor”);
- anaphoric marker (“presence” vs. “absence”)
F0 values automatically measured on the modelled curve for the first stressed syllable within a tone group
(cf. Wichman, 2000)
Total: 12,272 values
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Data extraction and analysis (1)
Even after logarithmic transform, the distribution of onset F0 values significantly diverged from a normal distribution.
All ANOVA results were checked using two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests (KST) during transitive and
intransitive binary comparisons.
Raw distributionLog transformed
distributionNormal
distribution
Kurtosis 4.54 0.13 1
Skewness 1.73 0.5 0
Shapiro-Wilk normality test: W=0.7852 / p < 2.2e-16
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Results: Tone Group factor
Minor Major
100
200
300
400
500
Onset F0 values: tone group factor alone Significant effect
ANOVA: F=513.7, p<2e-16
4.5 ST difference
Hierarchically higher units have higher onset
values
Lower onset values correspond to minor (i.e. more cohesive)
units
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Results: Anaphora factor
-A t +A t -A T -A T
10
02
00
30
04
00
50
0
Onset F0 values: anaphoric and tone group factors Significant effect
ANOVA: F=54.94, p=1.32e-13
3.9 ST difference
Anaphoric markers of cohesion do influence resetting phenomena
« anaphoric » units have higher onset
values
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
A paradoxical effect ?
Discussion
Anaphora Higher resettings
Less cohesionMore cohesion
Constant resulting degree of cohesion
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Discussion
A closer look at resetting phenomena
Resetting phenomena
Discourse constraints
More cohesion
lower values
Planning and Production constraints
declination
higher values
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Discussion
Interaction with anaphora
Resetting phenomena
Anaphora
Anaphoric markers
Discourse constraints
More cohesion
lower values
Planning and Production constraints
declination
higher values
Conclusions and perspectives
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Conclusion and Perspectives
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Conclusion …
• Markers of cohesion seem to interact in complex ways
• More particularly, anaphoric markers of cohesion influence resetting phenomena
This constitutes arguments in favor of a unified approach to discourse taking into account both:
• the cognitive and pragmatic processes involved in it and
• their actual realisations in its linguistic product
Conclusion and Perspectives
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
… and perspectives
Delicate results:
• Statistical correlations / causality relations
• Numerous other factors
• Perspectives• Distinction between sentential and discourse markers• Speaker-normalised data• Other conceptions of resetting phenomena (as a differential value rather than an absolute one)• Analyses taking into account both anaphoric markers and connectives (cf. Auran & Hirst, submitted)
Thank you for your attention !
;o)
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
Presentation available from http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~auran/
Details on the Aix-MARSEC project available from
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~EPGA/
Corpus study
6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003
14 ASCII prosodic annotation symbols:
_ low level~ high level< step-down> step-up/’ (high) rise-fall
‘/ high\ high fall fall-rise/ high rise
, low rise‘ low fall,\ (low rise-fall – not used)\, low fall-rise* stressed but unaccented| minor intonation unit boundary|| major intonation unit boundary