1 Introduction This paper describes Heterogeneous Relation Graphs (HRG), a formalism for describing linguistic structures. HRG was developed for use in a speech synthesis system (Festival (Black et al., 1996-1999)), and its design reflects the specific needs of such a system 1 . However, in essence HRG can also be used to store any type of linguistic structure and we have found it useful for database annotation and other speech and language applications. Storing linguistic information in speech synthesis systems presents some particularly interesting problems that distinguish this from some other formalisms used in speech and language processing. Foremost of these is that the linguistic data processed in a synthesis system is linguistically heterogeneous. That is, rather than dealing with syntax or phonology independently, synthesizers can be involved in text analysis, syntactic analysis, morphology, phonology, phonetics, prosody, articulatory control and acoustics. It is highly des...

late 1950's. It's basic premises are that phonological structure reflects the linguistic competence of the individual native speaker to compute a phonetic representation for the potentially infinite number of sentences generated by the syntactic component of the grammar and that this competence can be investigated in a serious scientific fashion. The generative point of view has become dominant in the field of linguistics and has had varying degrees of influence on other cognitive sciences. This entry surveys the development of the generative approach over three fifteen-year segments and concludes with current research trajectories. 1. SPE: 1960- 1975 The early work of Chomsky and Halle both embraces and rejects various aspects of the two major schools of American Structural Linguistics inaugurated by Edward Sapir 1 (1884-1942) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). Sapir's "Item and Process " model posits an abstract Phonological Representation that is converted to a Phonetic Representation by processes that delete, add, and change sounds. Sapir stressed the

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A classic function of intonation is to indicate the distribution of given and new information in an utterance. This paper defines given in two ways: known and salient. It then examines 63 utterances from a radio talk show corpus to determine whether either definition of given is predictive of the intonational contours found in the corpus. Given as salient is found to reliably predict one class of contour: the sustained tones, and one type of boundary tone, a final Mid (Liberman, 1975).

The word ‘prosody ’ comes from ancient Greek, where it was used for a “song sung with instrumental music”. In later times the word was used for the “science of versification ” and the “laws of metre”, governing the modulation of the human voice in reading poetry aloud. In modern phonetics the word ‘prosody ’ and its adjectival

This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient, and that logical inconsistency is sufficient as an indicator of rejection, but it is not necessary. I show how conversants can use information structure and prosody as well as logical reasoning in distinguishing between acceptances and logically consistent rejections, and relate this work to previous work on implicature and default reasoning by introducing three new classes of rejection: IMPLIGATURE REJECTIONS, EPISTEMIC REJECTIONS and DELIBERATION REJECTIONS. I show how these rejections are inferred as a result of default inferences, which, by other analyses, would have been blocked by the context. In order to account for these facts, I propose a model of the common ground that allows these default inferences to go through, and show how the model, originally proposed to account for the various forms of acceptance, can also model all types of rejection.

and prosody of dialogue

A method is introduced for using hidden Markov models (HMMs) to model intonational structure. HMMs are probabilistic and can capture the variability in structure which previous finite state network models lack. We show how intonational tunes can be modelled by separate HMMs and how HMMs can be used in a recognition system to automatically determine the tune type of an utterance. 1. INTRODUCTION An intonational tune can be thought of as a distinctive contour type: utterances with the same tune sound the same intonationally, independent of the text of the utterance. Tunes have often been described in terms of idealised sequences of more atomic intonational units. For example, O'Connor and Arnold's [6] high drop consists of a low pre-head, high head and low fall, while Liberman 's surprise/redundancy tune is L* H* L-L% [5]. Two approaches can be employed when producing a comprehensive inventory of tune types. Tunes can be classified in a bottom-up manner whereby similar patterns are gro...

This contribution calls attention to the intermodular potential of the interactionist architecture that multiple spell-out (Uriagereka 1999) and derivation by phase (Chomsky 2000, 2001 et seq.) have introduced. The shipping back and forth of pieces between (morpho-)syntax and the PF/LF interfaces during the derivation of a sentence establishes a pipe between the concatenative and the interpretational devices that did not exist in GB or earlier versions of the inverted T-/Y-architecture. It creates a situation where syntactic theories and analyses may have direct consequences on the phonological side, and vice versa. I submit that intermodular argumentation provides stronger evidence than what can be produced by modular-internal reasoning: it offers the maximal degree of independent assessment that linguists can expect without leaving their discipline. Be it only for that reason, the new interactionist architecture that the minimalist orientation has installed is a good thing to have: after a long period of quasi-silence, syntacticians and phonologists can talk again about things not concerning the weather or job openings. This is one goal of the paper, which will be briefly illustrated by two case studies where syntax can be argued to act as a referee for competing phonological theories (the PIC and the phase edge).

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