Publications

It has often been suggested that speakers use prosodic tune to convey the information structure of an utterance. Researchers argue that there is a specific pitch accent or tune associated with the focus (or comment) of an utterance, which is distinct from the pitch accent or tune associated with the topic. For example, Steedman (1991) has proposed that the L+H* LH% pattern is “the theme tune” and at least one function of this tune is to mark “what the utterance is about.” (p. 275). Vallduvi and Zacharski (1994) note that this L+H* LH% tune “is generally not correlated with a focus in a focus-ground partition”, thus supporting Steedman’s claim, to the extent that focus and topic/theme are complementary notions. In earlier work, Bolinger (1986 and earlier works), Jackendoff (1972), and Gundel (1978) propose that a rise-fall (A) accent typically falls on the comment of a sentence, whereas accented topics receive a fall-rise (B) accent.

Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 1997. “Topic-Comment Structure, Syntactic Structure and Prosodic Tune,” Workshop on Prosody and Grammar in Interaction, Helsinki, Finland, August 13-15.(pdf)

This is a paper I presented at the 1995 Annual International Voice Technologies Conference about work I did jointly with Judy Delin. Most people would agree that the intonation of synthesized voices sounds unnatural. There have been attempts to improve this based on syntax, but those attempts have had limited success. This paper describes a system we developed that produced spoken directions in a dialogue system.  I was very fortunate to have worked with Judy Delin.

Delin, Judy and Ron Zacharski. 1995. Pragmatic factors in the production of intonation contours for conversational systems. Proceedings of the Annual International Voice Technologies Conference 14.55-63. (PDF)

Recent work in formal semantics argues that the interpretation of a number of logico-semantic operators is crucially defined in function of the traditional focus-ground partition. For this proposal to hold, one needs to assume that sentences with more than one of these operators contain multiple focus-ground partitions in an overlapping or recursive fashion. This paper shows that such an assumption is unwarranted. A careful analysis of the English facts and a contrastive look at languages that realize focus-ground syntactically, like Catalan, reveal that not all accented constituents are foci in a focus ground partition but that operators can nevertheless associate with them.

Vallduví, Enric and Ron Zacharski. 1994. Accenting phenomena, association with focus, and the recursiveness of focus-ground. Paper presented at the Ninth Amsterdam Colloquium. (pdf).