1.1 Background Since Steven Abney's 1987 MIT dissertation, The English Noun Phrase in Its Sentential Aspect, the socalled DP Hypothesis has gained acceptance in the eld of Government and Binding (GB) syntax. This hypothesis proposes that a nominal expression is headed by a determiner that takes a noun phrase as its complement. The preexisting NP Hypothesis, on the other hand, diagrams nominal e...

Since Bolinger’s [1] discovery that pitch cues accentual prominence in English, a tension has arisen between two strategies: equating accent with pitch excursions and relying on perception for identifying accented words. This paper investigates the relation between prominence judgments from untrained listeners and accentual labels produced by trained transcribers. Naïve speakers of English, Spa...

We performed a cognitive experiment in order to obtain evidence that prosody is used for the segmentation of continuous speech for understanding in real time. We assume that the cognitive unit in Japanese speech is the accentual phrase (AP) which is represented by low and high pitch patterns according to the Japanese accent rule. Meaningless speech which consisted of two APs was used as the exp...

It is proposed here that basic Farsi intonation structure consists of three levels, in increasing hierarchical order: the Accentual Phrase (AP), the intermediate phrase (ip), and the Intonation Phrase (IP). The end of the AP is often marked by a high tone, Ha, and rarely a low tone, La (La occurs vacuously utterance finally, marked by L-L%. In this paper, this type of La is not labeled). An AP ...

Two studies documented the American English usage frequencies for ninety-seven nouns that occur with sentence complements (e.g., "rumor," "The rumor that the student cheated..."). An established usage preference methodology was used (see Connine, Ferreira, Jones, Clifton, & Frazier, 1984; Kennison, 1999). In Study 1, participants completed short fragments that did not contain the overt compleme...

This paper proposes a prosodic structure and the tonal pattern of Georgian, the national language of Georgia. The language has three prosodic units above the Word: Intonation Phrase (IP), Intermediate Phrase (ip), and Accentual Phrase (AP). All these units are marked by a boundary tone, but an AP in Georgian is unique typologically in that it has pitch accent linked to a stressed syllable and p...

Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) face unique challenges since it must achieve a double bottom line— outreach and sustainability. So is microfinance worthwhile or worthless? The proper performance measurement framework here is a better way to judge this than a simple measure of numbers. This paper seeks to present, to MFIs, a new rigorous performance measurement framework that incorporates the b...