Speakers may use pitch accents as pointers to new information, or as signals of a contrast relation between the accented item and a limited set of alternatives. There is no consensus in the literature whether a separately identi able contrastive accent exists. Some studies report that contrastive accents are more emphatic than newness accents and have a di erent melodic shape. In other studies,...

(1) can be uttered as part of a ”strategy of inquiry” (Roberts 1998, 4) where it is under discussion what members of a contextually given set of people wanted to see. It reports on Sandy’s wishes as opposed to those of the other members of the set. The felicity of this sentence under these circumstances can be made to follow from the assumption that the content of What Sandy wanted to see is th...

This study examines the visual cues to prosodic contrastive focus in Hexagonal French and their role in visual speech perception. Two audiovisual corpora were recorded (from two male native speakers of French) consisting of sentences with a subject-verb-object (SVO) syntactic structure. Four conditions were studied: focus on each phrase (S,V,O) and broad focus. The corpora were first acoustical...

Urdu/Hindi has SOV default word order and an immediately preverbal default focus position [1, 2]. When focus is syntactically determined relative to the verb, verb focus is difficult to realize by position. We were therefore interested in the interplay between syntax and prosody with respect to verb focus in languages such as Urdu/Hindi and investigated the prosody associated with verb focus in...

Maximum-likelihood (ML) learning of Markov random fields is challenging because it requires estimates of averages that have an exponential number of terms. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods typically take a long time to converge on unbiased estimates, but Hinton (2002) showed that if the Markov chain is only run for a few steps, the learning can still work well and it approximately minimizes a d...

Suppose that Ann says, “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” Her audience may well agree. Her knowledge ascription may seem true. But now suppose that Ben—in a different context—also says “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” His audience may well disagree. His knowledge ascription may seem false. Indeed, a number of philosophers have claimed that people’s intuitions a...