INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Intonation of Left Dislocated Topics in Modern Greek

David Le Gac (1), Hiyon Yoo (2)

(1) LiDiFra, France
(2) LLF (UMR 7110), France

We present in this paper the results of a production experiment testing the effects of the discourse activation state on the intonation of left-dislocated topics in Modern Greek. The activation states of the topics (active, inactive and semi-active) were examined in three different sentence types, namely declaratives, WH-questions and yes-no questions. Results show that the tunes are not affected by activation state but by sentence type. This supports the idea that the intonation of these topics is rather governed by phonological process, probably grounded on perceptually oriented principles.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Gac, David Le / Yoo, Hiyon (2011): "Intonation of left dislocated topics in modern greek", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 1361-1364.