ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Resolving Category Ambiguities - Evidence from Stress Shift

Esther Grabe, Paul Warren, Francis Nolan

Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

This paper presents an experimental study of stress shift in category-ambiguous material. Sequences such as Chinese fan exhibit phonological evidence for two structural analyses. If Chinese is an adjective, fan is stressed; the sequence is a syntactic phrase. If Chinese is a noun, fan is deaccented and the sequence a compound. Additionally, as Chinese is a stress shift item, stress shift may apply in the phrasal interpretation. Thus, category-ambiguous sequences with a potential for stress shift might contain earlier cues to syntactic category than sequences without such a potential. Production data show that stress shift patterns do indeed map onto syntactic categories, but only if the second element in the sequence is not right-branching. A comprehension experiment suggests that stress shift may facilitate category assignment.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Grabe, Esther / Warren, Paul / Nolan, Francis (1993): "Resolving category ambiguities - evidence from stress shift", In Prosody-1993, 24-27.