there are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. the former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. this study explores how relative importance is realized in english and persian. it also investigates how advanced persian learne...

There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...

In this paper we investigate the contribution of consonant duration to the signaling of accentual prominence in Mawng, a language spoken in Northern Australia. We compare consonants in VC sequences where the vowel is part of an accented or tonic syllable vs. non-tonic (non-prominent) VC sequences. We further analyse the contribution of vowel-consonant timing to prominence, through an analysis o...

If we focus on ‘relevance’, the textual metafunction creates relevance by adding prominence through assigning relative value to parts of the clause (Matthiessen 1992). The Theme, for instance, functions to select meaning(s) from the clause (Hannay & Martínez Caro, 2008) and to assign them thematic prominence, which has consequences for the thematic development of the text (Fries, 1992) in contr...

We have presented a case of a 22-year-old patient having a rare variety of arthrogryposis multiplex congenita arthrogryposis with epileptic seizures and defect in neural migration. We have described the patient’s disease history, the clinical, and laboratory data by giving prominence to the lack of mental retardation and the late onset of the generalized tonic-clonic seizures, despite the prese...

The instructions under which raters quantify syllable prominence perception need to be simple in order to maintain immediate reactions. This leads to noise in the rating data that can be dealt with by normalization, e.g. setting central tendency = 0 and dispersion = 1 (as in Z-score normalization). Questions arise such as: Which parameter is adequate here to capture central tendency? Which refe...

Byzantine Chant performance practice is computationally compared to the Chrysanthine theory of the eight Byzantine Tones (octoechos). Intonation, steps, and prominence of scale degrees are quantified, based on pitch class profiles. The novel procedure introduced here comprises the following analysis steps: 1) The pitch trajectory is extracted and post processed with music-specific filters. 2) P...

In the present study we investigated the effect of semantic context on the perception of words that differ only in the lexical stress pattern. Our study was based on the disyllabic German word AUGUST. Depending on whether the lexical stress is on the first or the second syllable the word refers to either a name or a month. By means of a forced-choice identification experiment we tested to what ...

Correspondence: mjmsxjj@gmail. com School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China Systemic Phonology: Recent Studies in English is an extremely timely addition to the literature of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Despite the importance of phonology to any general description of language, the editors note that this is the first collection focusing on phonolog...