Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Jennifer Venditti (2000)

Discourse Structure and Attentional Salience Effects on Japanese Intonation

Advisor: Mary Beckman

Abstract:

This thesis investigates the role that intonation can play in cueing discourse structure and attentional salience in spoken Japanese. Many studies of English and other languages have investigated how the marking of intonational prominence using pitch accents is related to the attentional salience of discourseentities. In Japanese, in contrast, the presence/absence of a pitch accent is an inherent property of a word itself, and does not have such a discourse function. However, this thesis presents data suggesting that Japanese speakers can use another means to achieve the same goal: variation of pitch range can systematically mark the salience of entities in Japanese discourse.

Data were collected from a read speech database, and analyzed in terms of two well-known and widely-used theories of intonation and discourse: the Japanese ToBI intonation model, and the model ofdiscourse structuring and global/local attentional state proposed by Grosz and colleagues. Results indicate that Japanese speakers can mark discourse structuring, global and local discourse salience, and local salience relations by varying the intonational prominence (via pitch range manipulation) of referring expressions. Specifically, speakers tend to realize discourse segment-initial phrases with high pitch range, and final phrases with lower range. In addition, Japanese speakers use intonational means to cue the global salience of discourse entities: referring expressions whose antecedent is in the current discourse segment, or a hierarchically- or linearly-recent segment have a lower range, while those which are new to the discourse or whose antecedent was in a non-recent segment tend to have a higher range. Local attentional salience and salience relations are also found to affect intonational prominence: speakers mark the local center of attention using non-prominent intonation (all else equal). Maintenance of the Center across adjacent utterances results in non-prominent marking, while shifting the attention to a new discourse referent is marked by prominent intonation. In addition, half of the speakers adopt a strategy whereby Centering transition type interacts with the hierarchical structure of the discourse. The data suggest that Japanese speakers can manipulate pitch range to cue many of the same discourse properties which are cued by pitch accent in English.