An Empirical Analysis of the Correlation of Syntax and Prosody
This work addresses the problem of understanding the syntax-prosody interface for linguists and computational linguists, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data with detailed analysis.
The paper tackled the gap between detailed linguistic studies and large-scale applications of the syntax-prosody interface by analyzing correlations between prosodic realization and specific syntactic functions using linear mixed effects models on a large corpus of German encyclopedic texts, finding significant effects such as subjects having a positive effect on pitch and duration but a negative effect on loudness compared to objects.
The relation of syntax and prosody (the syntax--prosody interface) has been an active area of research, mostly in linguistics and typically studied under controlled conditions. More recently, prosody has also been successfully used in the data-based training of syntax parsers. However, there is a gap between the controlled and detailed study of the individual effects between syntax and prosody and the large-scale application of prosody in syntactic parsing with only a shallow analysis of the respective influences. In this paper, we close the gap by investigating the significance of correlations of prosodic realization with specific syntactic functions using linear mixed effects models in a very large corpus of read-out German encyclopedic texts. Using this corpus, we are able to analyze prosodic structuring performed by a diverse set of speakers while they try to optimize factual content delivery. After normalization by speaker, we obtain significant effects, e.g. confirming that the subject function, as compared to the object function, has a positive effect on pitch and duration of a word, but a negative effect on loudness.