Michael Wagner presented two talks, “Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection” on October 2 at the Universität Wien and “The Iambic-Trochaic Law Revisited” on October 1 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies at Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Abstracts are below.
Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection: Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, but also constrain scalar implicatures, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then ‘project’ in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions, building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Artstein (2002). When looking at association with ‘only” or scalar implicatures, however, it’s not clear that these tap the same notion of alternatives. Instead, what we find looks more like semantic domain restriction.
The Iambic-Trochaic Law Revisited: When we hear a sequence of sounds, we often spontaneously perceive them as grouped, and we perceive a rhythm. Bolton (1894) famously discovered several regularities in how we perceive sequences of sounds, one of which is known today as the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) of rhythmic perception. The ITL holds that alternating long and short sounds are perceived as sequences of binary groups with final prominence (“iambs”), while alternating soft and loud sounds are perceived as sequences of binary groups with initial prominence (“trochees”). This talk reports on production and perception experiments that illustrate how the ITL emerges as an epiphenomenon of the way listeners parse the signal along two, in principle orthogonal, perceptual dimensions: grouping and prominence. Some aspects of how this aspect of speech parsing works is surprisingly robust cross-linguistically, even though the ITL is not. The two perceptual decisions are orthogonal in principle, but they compete to explain overlapping sets of acoustic cues. The two decisions mutually constrain each other, much as in vision the perceptual decision about an object’s size competes with the decision about how far away it is.