RO  EN
IMI/Publicaţii/CSJM/Ediţii/CSJM v.22, n.3 (66), 2014/

Recognition and Prediction for Implicit Contrastive Focus in Romanian

Authors: Neculai Curteanu, Alex Moruz, Cecilia Bolea, Andrei Scutelnicu
Keywords: prosody prediction for the Romanian clause, contrastive focus hierarchies; Communicative Dynamism degrees; Systemic Ordering, Implicit Contrastive Focus in Romanian; Implicit Contrastive Focus estimation scheme; Discourse-Prosody interface.

Abstract

This paper is made up of two parts: the first part continues the theoretical investigations on Information Structure (IS), linguistic, and computational approaches suitable to provide solutions to the prosody prediction problem of Implicit Contrastive Focus (ICF) concept, introduced in our previous papers. ICF is meant to be the particular case but also the counterpart of the classical category of contrastive Focus at the finite clause level, as the second item in the Background-Focus pair of IS dimension. The classical contrastive Focus, which we called Explicit Contrastive Focus (ECF), is the intonationally F marked entity introduced by overt lexical contrastive markers. ICF labels the situations where contrastive intonational focusation occurs but without the lexical presence of the contrastive Focus markers! The only and main device to introduce the contrastive focusation on certain constituents is the syntactic dislocation from their specific positions in the Systemic Ordering (SO) of syntactic-semantic roles for the Romanian finite clause. The ICF problem means to obtain reliable algorithms and procedures on the Discourse-Prosody interface in order to accurately predict the contrastive Focus distribution within the Romanian ICF-type affirmative finite clause. \textbf{The second, applicative part} of the paper describes algorithms for solving the ICF problem for Romanian, trying to exploit the typically dislocated constituents in the finite clause and to predict their Prosodic Prominence (PP). Procedures for the development of intonational-prosodic patterns assigned to the ICF distribution by certain ICF estimation schemes are developed and tested for a balanced set of Romanian ICF-type affirmative finite clauses.

Neculai Curteanu1, Alex Moruz2, Cecilia Bolea1, Andrei Scutelnicu2
1 Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch
E-mail:
2 Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch, and Faculty of
Computer Science, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi
E-mail: ,



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