In this project we explore the functional motivation for different types of prominence phenomena using a Bayesian account of communication. In a specific context (e.g. an astronomical context), some objects (the sun) have more discourse prominence than others (Albiorix - a small moon of Saturn) as they are more likely to be mentioned. At the same time, some ways of referring to an object will have more form prominence ("the star at the centre of the solar system") than others ("it"), the former having fewer potential interpretations, and (usually) requiring more speaker effort. We observe that when discourse prominence is high, form prominence is low, and vice-versa. This project provides mathematical and/or computational explanations for phenomena like this. In Phase III, the project will take particular interest in the impact of repetition, boundaries, individual differences and interaction on different kinds of prominence.

This project collaborates with others within the CRC and beyond it.

See list of publications

Publications

To appear

• Grice, Martine, Michelina Savino, Petra B. Schumacher, Christine T. Röhr & T. Mark Ellison. To appear. Rises on Pitch Accents and Edge Tones Affect Serial Recall Performance at Item and Domain levels. Laboratory Phonology. pdf

2024

• Ellison, T. Mark & Fahime Same. 2024. Experimental versus in-corpus variation in referring expression choice. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti & Nianwen Xue (eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 6838–6848. Torino, Italia: ELRA & ICCL.
• Reinöhl, Uta & Mark Ellison. 2024. Metaphor forces argument overtness. Linguistics.

2023

• Kaland, Constantijn & T. Mark Ellison. 2023. Evaluating cluster analysis on f0 contours: An information theoretic approach on three languages. In Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 3448–3452. Guarant International. pdf
• Patterson, Clare & Petra B Schumacher. 2023. How focus and position affect the interpretation of demonstrative pronouns [Registered Report]. Collabra: Psychology 9(1). 75350.

2022

• Ellison, T. Mark & Fahime Same. 2022. Constructing Distributions of Variation in Referring Expression Type from Corpora for Model Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2989–2997. Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association. pdf
• Patil, Umesh & Petra B. Schumacher. 2022. Modeling prominence constraints for German pronouns as weighted retrieval cues. In Terrence C. Stewart (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, 216–221. preprint: pdf
• Röhr, Christine T., Michelina Savino & Martine Grice. 2022. The effect of intonational rises on serial recall in German. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2022, 759–763. Lisbon, Portugal.

2021

• Kaland, Constantijn, Naomi Peck, T. Mark Ellison & Uta Reinöhl. 2021. An initial exploration of the interaction of tone and intonation in Kera’a. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 132–136. Sønderborg, Denmark. pdf
• Winter, Bodo & Martine Grice. 2021. Independence and generalizability in linguistics. Linguistics 59(5). 1251–1277.