More or less final version. To appear in Natural Language Semantics. According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflex of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association with focus constructions impossible. Furthermore, while focus has a uniform import, the sources of meaning differences in association with focus are various.

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This paper reports results from a program that produces high quality animation of facial expressions and head movements as automatically as possible in conjunction with meaning-based speech synthesis, including spoken intonation. The goal of the research is as much to test and define our theories of the formal semantics for such gestures, as to produce convincing animation. Towards this end we have produced a high level programming language for 3D animation of facial expressions. We have been concerned primarily with expressions conveying information correlated with the intonation of the voice: this includes the differences of timing, pitch, and emphasis that are related to such semantic distinctions of discourse as “focus”, “topic ” and “comment”, “theme ” and “rheme”, or “given ” and “new ” information. We are also interested in the relation of affect or emotion to facial expression. Until now, systems have not embodied such rule-governed translation from spoken utterance meaning to facial expressions. Our system embodies rules that describe and coordinate these relations: intonation/information, intonation/affect and facial expressions/affect. A meaning representation includes discourse information: what is contrastive/background information in the given context, and what is the “topic ” or “theme ” of the discourse. The system maps the meaning representation into how accents and their placement are chosen, how they are conveyed over facial expression and how speech and facial expressions are coordinated. This determines a sequence of functional groups: lip shapes, conversational signals, punctuators, regulators or manipulators. Our algorithms then impose synchrony, create coarticulation effects, and determine affectual signals, eye and head movements. The lowest level representation is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which makes the generation system portable to other facial models.

The paper proposes a theory relating syntax, semantics, and intonational prosody, and covering a wide range of English intonational tunes and their semantic interpretation in terms of focus and information structure. The theory is based on a version of combinatory categorial grammar which directly pairs phonological and logical forms without intermediary representational levels.

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This dissertation examines the "free" word order or scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory. To overcome the problems raised in single-component analyses in explaining word order variation, I propose an `interface' approach in which the constraints from several different components of grammar participate, compete, and interact with one another. That is, various word orders are considered to be motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles of these languages. As the constraints from different modules of grammar are highly conflicting, I utilize Optimality Theory to demonstrate how the constraints interact and resolve conflicts among one another. In this approach, each scrambled variant, i.e. a sentence with a particular word order, is conceived of as the "optimal" output, which instantiates the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-contextual information given in the input....

this paper we suggest some strategies for reuniting phonology and the rest of grammar in the context of a uniform constraint formalism. We explain why this is a desirable goal, and we present some conservative extensions to current practice in computational linguistics and in non-linear phonology which we believe are necessary and sufficient for achieving this goal. We begin by exploring the application of typed feature logic to phonology and propose a system of prosodic types. Next, taking HPSG as an exemplar of the grammar frameworks we have in mind, we show how the phonology attribute can be enriched, so that it can encode multi-tiered, hierarchical phonological representations. Finally, we exemplify the approach in some detail for the nonconcatenative morphology of Sierra Miwok and for schwa alternation in French. The approach taken in this paper lends itself particularly well to capturing phonological generalisations in terms of high-level prosodic constraints. 1. Phonology in Constraint-Based Grammar Classical generative phonology is couched within the same set of assumptions that dominated standard transformational grammar. Despite some claims that "derivations based on ordered rules (that is, external ordering) and incorporating intermediate structures are essential to phonology" (Bromberger & Halle, 1989:52), much recent work has tended towards a new model, frequently described in terms of constraints on well-formedness (Paradis, 1988; Goldsmith, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1993; Prince & Smolensky, 1993). While this work has an increasingly declarative flavour, most versions retain procedural devices for repairing representations that fail to meet certain constraints, or for constraints to override each other. This view is in marked contrast to the interpretation...

the present author, have offered different but related accounts of intonation structure in English and some other languages. These accounts share the assumption that the system of tones identified by Pierrehumbert (1980), as modified by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) and Silverman et al. (1992), has as transparent and type-driven a semantics in these languages as do their words and phrases. While the semantics of intonation in English concerns information structure and propositional attitude, rather than the predicate-argument relations and operator-scope relations that are familiar from standard semantics in the spirit of the papers collected as Montague 1974, this information-structural semantics is fully compositional, and can be regarded as a component of the same semantic system. The present paper builds on Steedman (1991) and Steedman (2000a) to develop a new semantics for intonation structure, which shares with the earlier versions the property of being fully integrated into Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, see Steedman 2000b, hereafter SP). This grammar integrates intonation structure into surface derivational structure and the associated Montague-style compositional semantics, even when the intonation structure departs from the restrictions of traditional surface structure. Many of the diverse discourse meanings that have been attributed to intonational tunes are shown to arise via conversational implicature from more primitive literal meanings distinguished along the three dimensions of information structure, speaker/hearer commitment, and contentiousness.

The almeture imposed apon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their Ixadifional surface-syntaetic struc- ture. However, the notion of "intonational struc- ture" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can tm $ubsurned under a rather dif- ferent notion of syntacti safface $ffueture that emexgem from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" exttmsion to Categorial Otan max. Interptationa of constituents at this level are in mrn directly related to "inforrnat[o structure ", or discourse-related notions of "theme", 'heme", "focus" and 'reatippo$ition". Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems.