anaphoric third person pronouns and prosodic features as markers of cohesion in english spoken...

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

[email protected]

6th NWCL International Conference Prosody and Pragmatics – Preston, November 14th-16th 2003

“Oh no, not another study on anaphora …”


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 …”


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 …”


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


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


Two views of discourse


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


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


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


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”)



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)



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

“pitch reset” or “resetting” (Brown & Yule, 1983; Wichmann, 2000; Couper-Kuhlen, 2001);

• major unit end: very low pitch, loss of amplitude, lengthy pauses (Brown and Yule, 1983) and creaky voice (Wichmann, 2000).



Resettings and cohesion:



More anaphoric marks more cohesion

Lower resettings more cohesion

Effects of cohesion markers:

Part III: Corpus study


• 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

• 8 annotation levels aligned: phonemes, syllable constituents,

syllables, words, feet and rythmic units, tone groups.

Corpus study


The Aix-MARSEC Corpus

An evolution from the SEC and MARSEC corpora

SEC

Spoken English Corpus

MARSEC

Machine Readable SEC

Aix-MARSEC

• Alignment of words and tone groups with the signal

• Conversion of all the TSM to ASCII characters

Corpus study


Data extraction and analysis (1)

Extraction of onset F0 values for all the tone groups which contained either a third person anaphoric pronoun or a

connective.

The whole of the Aix-MARSEC was used, except for the “E” type of recordings (“Daily Service”), the quality of which could

not guaranty accurate F0 detection).

Data extraction: Perl scripts on Aix-MARSEC Praat TextGrids

Data analysis: R software

Momel methodology (Di Cristo & Hirst, 1986; Hirst et al., 2000)

Corpus study



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



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


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


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


A paradoxical effect ?

Discussion

Anaphora Higher resettings

Less cohesionMore cohesion

Constant resulting degree of cohesion

Corpus study


Discussion

A closer look at resetting phenomena

Resetting phenomena

Discourse constraints

More cohesion

lower values

Planning and Production constraints

declination

higher values

Corpus study


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


Conclusion and Perspectives


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


… 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)


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


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

(Roach, 1994)

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anaphoric third person pronouns and prosodic features as markers of cohesion in english spoken...

Documents

discourse slide

views of discourse discourse

discourse discourse

discourse cohesion markers

discourse unity cohesion

marking of discourse

utterances discourse

cohesion cohesion