Research

The intonation of extra-sentential elements (thesis here)

My main research interest is the intonation of extra-sentential elements. Extra-sentential elements, (which have been also called parentheses, parenthetical elements, sentence-external elements, tags, and enclitized elements), are non-canonical syntactic constructions such as sentential adverbs (‘Obviously, she is wrong’) and dislocated phrases (‘They are nice, those girls’). Syntactically, these elements are considered to be governed by the root node, and in this sense they are ‘external’ to the phrase. Prosodically, they are also ‘external’ to the phrase since they obligatorily form independent phrasal units, which are demarcated by prosodic boundaries from the rest of the phrase. For this reason they have been an object of interest for both syntactic and prosodic studies, where they have been used to define the intonational phrase as a domain of the prosodic hierarchy (see, for instance, bibliography of work on extra-sentential elements compiled by Nicole Dehe).

For my doctoral dissertation, I have investigated the intonation of extra-sentential elements using data from Catalan and English, languages which encode information structure in different ways. The results of the four production experiments reported in my thesis show that extra-sentential elements do not behave as consistently as described in the literature. While certain types of elements such as, for instance, sentential adverbs, nearly always form independent phrases, other elements show a trade-off between intonation and prosodic separation. My interpretation is that both prosodic breaks and intonational mechanisms such as deaccentuation, reductions in pitch range, and/or tonal copy can be used in combination to signal the special status of the extra-sentential element.

I currently participate in the following Research Projects

- AMPER-Madrid: Atlas Multimedia de la Prosodia del Espacio Románico (Multimedia Atlas of the Prosody of the Romance Space).
December 2003-December 2006. Ref DGICYT-BFF2003-08487, awarded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Unión Europea.
Principal Investigators: Dr Michel Contini (France), Dr Martínez Celdrán (Barcelona), Dra Mª Dolores Ramírez (Madrid).

- Estructura prosódica y adquisición de la prosodia en catalán y español (Prosodic structure and acquisition of prosodic structure in Catalan and Spanish).
December 2006-December 2009. Ref. HUM2006-01758/FILO, awarded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia.
Principal Investigator: Dr Pilar Prieto.
The project has two broad aims. One is to gain an insight into the perceptual cues to prosodic structure by examining: (a) the role of tonal alignment as a perceptual cue to syllabic structure; (b) as a perceptual cue to word edges; and (c) duration and pitch accent as perceptual cues to the detection of lexical stress. Another goal of the project is to study the acquisition of prosody by infants whose first language is Catalan and/or Spanish.

- Adquisició del ritme en català, castella i anglès (Rhythm acquisition in Catalan, Spanish, and English).
September 2007-September 2008. Beques Batista i Roca Ref. 2007 PBR 29, awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Principal Investigator: Dr Pilar Prieto.
This is a collaborative project between researchers working in Catalan and in British Universities (Universitat Autonóma de Barcelona, Pilar Prieto and Maria del Mar Vanrell; University of Cambridge, Brechjte Post and Luisa Astruc; University of Oxford, Elinor Payne). The main goal is to investigate the acquisition of rhythm in Catalan, Spanish, and English, languages which belong to three typologically different rhythmic types. We plan to record children of different ages to study the evolution of their acquisition of the rhythmic patterns of their native language.