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We measure face deformations during speech production using a motion capture system, which provides 3D coordinate data of about 60 markers glued on the speaker's face. An arbitrary orthogonal factor analysis followed by a principal component analysis (together called a guided PCA) of the data has showed that the first 6 factors explain about 90% of the variance, for each of our 3 speakers. The 6 derived factors, therefore, allow us to efficiently analyze or to reconstruct with a reasonable accuracy the observed face deformations. Since these factors can be interpreted in articulatory terms, they can reveal underlying articulatory organizations. The comparison of lip gestures in terms of data derived factors suggests that these speakers differently maneuver the lips to achieve contrast between /s/ and /R/. Such inter-speaker variability can occur because the acoustic contrast of these fricatives is shaped not only by the lip tube but also by cavities inside the mouth such as the sublingual cavity. In other words, these tube and cavity can acoustically compensate each other to produce their required acoustic properties.
In order to understand the functional morphology of the human voice producing system, we are in need of data on the vocal tract anatomy of other mammalian species. The larynges and vocal tracts of four species of Artiodactyla were investigated in combination with acoustic analyses of their respective calls. Different evolutionary specializations of laryngeal characters may lead to similar effects on sound production. In the investigated species, such specializations are: the elongation and mass increase of the vocal folds, the volume increase of the laryngeal vestibulum by an enlarged thyroid cartilage and the formation of laryngeal ventricles. Both the elongation of the vocal folds and the increase of the oscillating masses lower the fundamental frequency. The influence of an increased volume of the laryngeal vestibulum on sound production remains unclear. The anatomical and acoustic results are presented together with considerations about the habitats and the mating systems of the respective species.
In this squib, I want to argue that the morphological structure of words is, at least to some extent, motivated. As an example I have choosen the partonomic (and for the less part taxonomic) nomenclature of the human body. While important work by Brown et alii (1973), Anderson (1978) and Schladt (1997) exists on this topic, these analyses focus on the conceptualization of body-parts and their semantics, but not on their morphological representation.
In the following, I want to check two predictions about the morphological complexity of lexical items denoting parts of the human body. The first assumption is that the most canonical body-parts are always expressed by mono-lexematic items. The second one consists in the assumption that body-parts of the lowest levels in the hierarchy are always morphologically complex. A set of six body-parts has been analysed in 27 languages. The set consists of two canonical (HEAD and EAR) and of one from the lowest level of the hierarchy (TOENAIL). For this I have adopted a sample from Schladt (1997) and a small one compiled by myself
In this paper, we outline the foundations of a theory of implicatures. It divides into two parts. The first part contains the base model. It introduces signalling games, optimal answer models, and a general definition of implicatures in terms of natural information. The second part contains a refinement in which we consider noisy communication with efficient clarification requests. Throughout, we assume a fully cooperative speaker who knows the information state of the hearer. The purpose of this paper is not the study of examples. Our concern is the framework for doing these studies.
Even if we can generate a logical form, principles of use may limit the ways in which we can use it. In this paper, I motivate one such principle of use, and explore its effects. Much of the discussion involves kinds of sentences that have received attention in the literature on "individual-level predicates".
What are incremental themes?
(2001)
In this paper I examine the approach to incremental themes developed in Krifka 1992,1998, Dowty 1991 and others, which argues that the extent of a telic event is determined by the extent of its incrementally affected theme. This approach identifies the defining property of an accomplishment event as being the fact that the theme relation is a homomorphism from parts of the event to parts of the (incremental) theme. I show that there are a large number of accomplishments, both lexical and derived via resultative predication, which cannot be characterised in this way. I then show that it is more insightful to characterise accomplishments in terms of their internally complex structure: an accomplishment event consists of a non-incremental activity event and an incrementally structured 'BECOME' event, which are related by a contextually available one-one function in such a way that the incremental structure of the latter is imposed on the activity.
This paper deals with early verb development (e.g., person, tense) until the emergence of verb-paradigms in two French-speaking children.
I will show the parallelism between the two children in the gradual building of paradigms, despite considerable differences in the rate of development. Individual differences on the other hand will bring me to reconsider the broad category of premorphological rote-learnt forms which already displays some patterning in one of the children's data.
The paper proposes structural constraints for different adjunct classes in German and English. Approaches in which syntax has only the task to provide adjunct positions and in which principles of scope are supposed to explain the distribution of adjuncts are rejected as incomplete. The syntactic requirements are not as rigid as other approaches require, such that there is just one possible position for a given adjunct. Rather the syntactic constraints may be fulfilled in different positions.
Internals from elaboration
(2001)
Elaboration or Narration, as so-called discourse relations (or rhetorical relations), are modelled in Segmented Discourse Structure Theory (SDRT) as relations between discourse constituents (or constituents for short). These are either propositions that come into being by interpretation of sentences occurring in a text; the propositions then have the status of DRSes. Or, constituents are compounds of such DRSes, constructed from DRSes (or compounds of them) by discourse relations. Elaboration and Narration in that sense, rather than referring to text types, provide links between constituents that allow them to combine in ways that, for a recipient, a resulting text is coherent and has (some) elaborative or narrative properties.
The effects of different forms of predication have been insightfully (and almost exclusively) studied for 'simple' cases of predication, of which the 'presentational sentence' is maybe the paradigm instantiation. It is the aim of this paper to show that thc same kind of effects as well as in fact the same kind of structures are present at embedded levels in thematically and otherwise more complex structures. Beyond presentational sentences, 'unaccusative' experiencing constructions involving a dative subject, 'double object constructions' and - to a lesser extent - spraylload constructions are discussed. For all of these, it is argued that they comprise a predication encoding the ascription of a transient temporal property to a location. On this basis, a proposal is made as to how the scope asymmetry between the two arguments involved in the colistructions can be explained. Furthermore, a proposal is made as to how what has been called 'argument shift' is motivated.