Text-to-speech synthesis enables the speech-impeded user of an augmentative and alternative communication system to partake in any conversation on any topic, because it can produce dynamic content. Current synthetic voices do not sound very natural, however, lacking in the areas of emphasis and emotion. These qualities are furthermore important to convey meaning and intent beyond that which can be achieved by the vocabulary of words only. Put differently, speech synthesis requires a more comprehensive analysis of its text input beyond the word level to infer the meaning and intent that elicit emphasis and emotion. The synthesised speech then needs to imitate the effects that these textual factors have on the acoustics of human speech. This research addresses these challenges by commencing with a literature study on the state of the art in the fields of natural language processing, text-to-speech synthesis and speech prosody. It is noted that the higher linguistic levels of discourse, information structure and affect are necessary for the text analysis to shape the prosody appropriately for more natural synthesised speech. Discourse and information structure account for meaning, intent and emphasis, and affect formalises the modelling of emotion. The OCC model is shown to be a suitable point of departure for a new model of affect that can leverage the higher linguistic levels. The audiobook is presented as a text and speech resource for the modelling of discourse, information structure and affect because its narrative structure is prosodically richer than the random constitution of a traditional text-to-speech corpus. A set of audiobooks are selected and phonetically aligned for subsequent investigation. The new model of discourse, information structure and affect, called e-motif, is developed to take advantage of the audiobook text. It is a subjective model that does not specify any particular belief system in order to appraise its emotions, but defines only anonymous affect states. Its cognitive and social features rely heavily on the coreference resolution of the text, but this process is found not to be accurate enough to produce usable features values. The research concludes with an experimental investigation of the influence of the e-motif features on human speech and synthesised speech. The aligned audiobook speech is inspected for prosodic correlates of the cognitive and social features, revealing that some activity occurs in the into national domain. However, when the aligned audiobook speech is used in the training of a synthetic voice, the e-motif effects are overshadowed by those of structural features that come standard in the voice building framework. / PhD (Information Technology), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar como os falantes administram o fluxo da informação no português brasileiro (PB). De acordo com Lambrecht 1994, a administração do fluxo da informação está calcada basicamente em três funções: função com foco no predicado (tópico-comentário), função com foco no argumento (identificacional) e função com foco em toda a sentença (que pode ser de reportar um evento ou apresentacional). Para chegar a essas funções, Lambrecht utiliza seis noções independentes, mas interrelacionadas: pressuposição e asserção pragmática, ativação e identificabilidade de referentes e tópico e foco. O presente trabalho defende a idéia de que existe uma máxima pragmática cognitivamente motivada que leva o falante a primeiro introduzir um referente, para então dizer algo sobre ele. O quadro teórico no qual a pesquisa se desenvolve é o da Lingüística Cognitiva, dentro da qual, mais especificamente, incluem-se estudos da área da Pragmática Discursiva, que tem por objeto o estudo da estrutura da informação. Essa área investiga as relações entre a estrutura formal das sentenças (sintática e prosódica) e as suposições do falante sobre o estado mental do ouvinte. Os dados utilizados para a análise baseiam-se em um corpus formado pela transcrição de dez narrativas orais, feitas a partir do filme História da Pêra, elaborado por Chafe 1980. A partir dessas narrativas, foi possível chegar a um quadro que descreve a estruturação da informação no português brasileiro. A principal particularidade do PB em relação à estruturação da informação consiste na manifestação formal das construções com foco em toda a sentença. / This thesis aims at investigating how users organize information flow in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). According to Lambrecht 1994, the management of information flow is primarily based on three functions: predicate-focus structure (topic-comment), argumentfocus structure (identificational) and sentence-focus structure (event reporting or apresentational). His analysis comprises six independent but inter-related notions: pragmatic pressuposition and pragmatic assertion, identifiability and activation, topic and focus. I intend to explore the idea that there is a cognitively motivated pragmatic maxim, which induces the speaker to introduce a referent first, and then say something about it. The theoretical background is the one of Cognitive Linguistics, more specifically Discourse Pragmatics, which comprises the study of information structure. This studies are based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects the speakers´s assumption about the hearer´s state of knowledge and counscionusness at the time of utterance. To achieve my goals, I used a corpus composed by transcriptions of ten oral narratives, estimulated by the Pear Story movie, produced by Chafe 1980. With the empirical study, it was possible to describe how information is structured in Brazilian Portuguese. When it comes to information structure, the main specificity of BP is the formal manifestation of sentence-focus structures.

Linguists and philosophers of language have shown increasing interest in the expressions that refer to quantifiers: determiners like 'every' and 'many', in addition to determiner phrases like 'some king' and 'no cat'. This thesis addresses several puzzles where the way we understand quantifier expressions depends on features that go beyond standard truth conditional semantic meaning. One puzzle concerns the fact that it is often natural to understand 'Every king is in the yard' as being true if (say) all of the kings at the party are in the yard, even though the standard truth conditions predict it to be true if and only if every king in the universe is in the yard. Another puzzle emerges from the observation that 'Every American king is in the yard' sounds odd relative to contexts where there are no American kings, even though the standard truth conditions predict it to be trivially true. These puzzles have been widely discussed within linguistics and philosophy of language, and have implications for topics as diverse as the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and the ontological commitments of ordinary individuals. Yet few attempts have been made to incorporate discussions from the linguistics literature into the philosophical literature. This thesis argues that attending to the linguistics literature helps to address these puzzles. In particular, my solutions to these puzzles rely on notions from work on information structure, an often overlooked area of linguistics. I will use these notions to develop a new theory of the pragmatics of ordinary discourse, in the process of resolving the puzzles. In the first two chapters, I provide accessible overviews of key notions from the literature on quantifier expressions and information structure. In the third chapter, I discuss the problem of contextual domain restriction. In the fourth chapter, I consider the problems posed by empty restrictors. In the final chapter, I tackle the issue of category mistakes.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar como os falantes administram o fluxo da informação no português brasileiro (PB). De acordo com Lambrecht 1994, a administração do fluxo da informação está calcada basicamente em três funções: função com foco no predicado (tópico-comentário), função com foco no argumento (identificacional) e função com foco em toda a sentença (que pode ser de reportar um evento ou apresentacional). Para chegar a essas funções, Lambrecht utiliza seis noções independentes, mas interrelacionadas: pressuposição e asserção pragmática, ativação e identificabilidade de referentes e tópico e foco. O presente trabalho defende a idéia de que existe uma máxima pragmática cognitivamente motivada que leva o falante a primeiro introduzir um referente, para então dizer algo sobre ele. O quadro teórico no qual a pesquisa se desenvolve é o da Lingüística Cognitiva, dentro da qual, mais especificamente, incluem-se estudos da área da Pragmática Discursiva, que tem por objeto o estudo da estrutura da informação. Essa área investiga as relações entre a estrutura formal das sentenças (sintática e prosódica) e as suposições do falante sobre o estado mental do ouvinte. Os dados utilizados para a análise baseiam-se em um corpus formado pela transcrição de dez narrativas orais, feitas a partir do filme História da Pêra, elaborado por Chafe 1980. A partir dessas narrativas, foi possível chegar a um quadro que descreve a estruturação da informação no português brasileiro. A principal particularidade do PB em relação à estruturação da informação consiste na manifestação formal das construções com foco em toda a sentença. / This thesis aims at investigating how users organize information flow in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). According to Lambrecht 1994, the management of information flow is primarily based on three functions: predicate-focus structure (topic-comment), argumentfocus structure (identificational) and sentence-focus structure (event reporting or apresentational). His analysis comprises six independent but inter-related notions: pragmatic pressuposition and pragmatic assertion, identifiability and activation, topic and focus. I intend to explore the idea that there is a cognitively motivated pragmatic maxim, which induces the speaker to introduce a referent first, and then say something about it. The theoretical background is the one of Cognitive Linguistics, more specifically Discourse Pragmatics, which comprises the study of information structure. This studies are based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects the speakers´s assumption about the hearer´s state of knowledge and counscionusness at the time of utterance. To achieve my goals, I used a corpus composed by transcriptions of ten oral narratives, estimulated by the Pear Story movie, produced by Chafe 1980. With the empirical study, it was possible to describe how information is structured in Brazilian Portuguese. When it comes to information structure, the main specificity of BP is the formal manifestation of sentence-focus structures.

This thesis analyses 'incomplete sentences' in languages which utilise distinctively agglutinative components in their morphology. In the grammars of the languages dealt with in this thesis, there are certain types of sentences which are variously referred to as 'elliptical sentences' (Turkish eksiltili c�mleler), 'incomplete sentences' (Uzbek to'liqsiz gaplar), 'cut-off sentences' (Turkish kesik c�mleler), etc., for which the grammarians provide elaborated semantic and syntactic analyses. The current work attempts to present an alternative approach for the analysis of such sentences. The distribution of morphemes in incomplete sentences is examined closely, based on which a system of analysis that can handle a variety of incomplete sentences in an integrated manner is proposed from a morphological point of view. It aims to aid grammarians as well as researchers in area studies by providing a simple description of incomplete sentences in agglutinative languages. The linguistic data are taken from Turkish, Uzbek, and Japanese, with special reference to (Bukharan) Tajik.

本研究首先以資訊差異模型描述IPOs股價橫斷面與縱斷面的比較與變化。在橫斷面比較上，本研究利用貝氏定理，令投資人在擬掛牌公司釋放出歷史資訊後，首先修正其事前信念以獲得事後信念，最後再以事後有限的資訊數量推估下一期的報酬率，然因歷史資訊之數量與品質不等，下一期預測報酬率之β係數亦顯然不同。資訊結構較佳者，估計風險較低，β係數較小；資訊結構較差者，估計風險較高，β係數較大。因此，為吸引投資人對資訊結構較差之IPOs的興趣，在必要報酬率要求較高的前提下，資訊結構較差之IPOs的承銷價格必須低訂，以製造投資人可以獲利的空間。因此，在其他條件相同的情況下，資訊結構較差之IPOs其掛牌初期的股價報酬率應該優於資訊結構較佳的IPOs。 其次，在IPOs縱斷面股價行為差異之模型推導上，本研究將市場IPOs區分成資訊結構佳者與資訊結構較差者，在資訊數量與發行時間成正相關的假設下，推導出當掛牌時間t趨近時，證券間之資訊差異效果遞減，且新發行證券之β係數遞減，因而進一步推論，就所有IPOs而言，後市股價報酬率將低於估計風險相對較高的掛牌初期股價報酬率。 另外，本研究之實證共分三個層次：第一層次就IPOs橫斷面股價行為方面。本研究首先就不同發行市場的IPOs之初期股價表現進行驗證。不同發行市場對擬掛牌公司之輔導期間與體質結構有不同的要求，一般而言，集中市場之發行面較店頭市場嚴格，因此，集中市場IPOs之資訊結構理論上比店頭市場IPOs佳。實證結果發現，資訊結構較佳之集中市場IPOs，其初期投資報酬率比店頭市場IPOs差。是故，實證結果支持不同發行市場之資訊結構差異假說。繼之，根據過去文獻與個案訪談的整理，若以內部人持股比、企業規模、企業年齡、承銷商聲譽、會計師聲譽與是否轉換發行市場作為單一發行市場內資訊結構優劣分際的標準時，發現，集中市場內資訊差異效果顯著；然店頭市場內，卻只有在空頭時期上櫃之IPOs，其初期投資報酬率具有資訊差異效果。 實證之第二層次為檢定IPOs縱斷面之股價變化是否亦具有資訊差異效果。首先就不同發行市場做比較，實證結果發現，集中市場因資訊結構較佳，正式掛牌前投資人與發行公司間資訊不對稱情形較不嚴重，因此，當蜜月期過後，股價逐漸迴歸真值時，掛牌一年後股價之修正幅度較資訊結構相對不佳的店頭市場IPOs小，因此，不同發行市場間，IPOs資訊結構之縱斷面差異效果獲得支持。另外，集中市場IPOs類屬資訊結構較佳者，其後市股價下修程度遠比資訊結構差者來得少。至於店頭市場之差異效果，雖然資訊結構較佳者其股價修正幅度小於資訊結構較差者，然兩者間並未達到統計上顯著差異性，因此店頭市場縱斷面之資訊差異效果並未獲得支持。 實證之第三層次，為檢定IPOs錯估訊號來源。實證結果發現，集中市場內，由聲譽較差之承銷商輔導上市及上市前每股盈餘越少之IPOs，越容易產生價格錯估行為。而店頭市場內，越是由聲譽較差之承銷商輔導上櫃或類屬傳統產業類股之IPOs，越容易產生價格錯估行為。 / The objective of this study is twofold. First, the paper develops a model to examine cross-sectionally and dynamically the effects of differential information on various initial public offerings (IPOs). Second, this paper examines the initial return and the after-market performance for IPOs, particularly the security valuation effects of structural differences in available information. There is a diversity of information among issuing firms at the time of their offering and particularly under certain trading system and certain market conditions. Through Bayesian model development, we support the effect of differential information among IPOs of structural differences. From empirical evidence, we find that during hot market conditions and under over-the-counter (OTC) trading system and for firms characterized by poor levels of available information, the market values of issuing firms are more likely to be overestimated in the immediate after-market. We also find positive overestimation of market values to be more likely for IPOs of smaller earnings per share (EPS) and those marketed by the less prestigious underwriters under Taiwan Security Exchange (TSE) trading system, and for IPOs other than hi-tech securities and those marketed by the less prestigious underwriters under OTC trading system.

This paper deals with Kiezdeutsch, a way of speaking that emerged among adolescents in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods of Germany. We show that, in Kiezdeutsch, we find evidence for both grammatical reduction and new developments in the domain of information structure, and hypothesise that this points to a systematic interaction between grammar and information structure, between weakened grammatical constraints and a more liberal realisation of information-structural preferences. We show that Kiezdeutsch can serve as an interesting test case for such an interaction, that this youth language is a multiethnolect, that is, a new variety that is spoken by speakers from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds, including German, and forms a dynamic linguistic system of its own, thus allowing for systematic developments on grammatical levels and their interfaces with extragrammatical domains.

Kinder erwerben Passivstrukturen später als die meisten anderen syntaktischen Strukturen. Die vorliegende Studie beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob dies auf informationsstrukturelle Faktoren zurückzuführen sein könnte. Probleme beim Erwerb von Passivsätzen wurden in vorhergehenden Studien unter anderem auf ihre geringe Inputfrequenz oder bestimmte syntaktische Charakteristika von Passivsätzen zurückgeführt. Jedoch konnte bisher keiner dieser Ansätze ihr spätes Erwerbsalter umfassend erklären. Während Aktivsätze, die kanonische, unmarkierte Satzstruktur im Deutschen, in jeglichem Diskurskontext verwendet werden können, werden Passivsätze fast ausschließlich dann verwendet, wenn der Patiens der beschriebenen Handlung schon vorerwähnt war und/ oder als Topik eines Satzes fungieren soll. Passivsätze sind also nicht in jedem Kontext informationsstrukturell adäquat. Kinder haben im Gegensatz zu Erwachsenen aufgrund ihrer geringeren syntaktischen Fähigkeiten Probleme, Sätze zu verarbeiten, die nicht in einem adäquaten Kontext stehen. Der Einfluss dieser Kontextbedingungen auf das Satzverständnis wurde in der vorliegenden Studie bei deutschsprachigen Kindern untersucht. Kindern zwischen 3;0 und 4;11 Jahren wurden Aktiv- oder Passivsätze präsentiert, denen informationsstrukturell adäquate, inadäquate oder neutrale Kontextsätze vorangingen. Wie erwartet verstanden die Kinder Aktivsätze besser als Passivsätze und 4-jährige Kinder zeigten bessere Leistungen als 3-jährige. Es gab Tendenzen, dass die 3-jährigen Kinder Passivsätze besser, aber Aktivsätze schlechter verstanden, wenn ihr Subjekt vorerwähnt wurde. Statistisch signifikante Kontexteffekte fanden sich jedoch im Gegensatz zu einer vergleichbaren Studie mit englischsprachigen Kindern (Gourley und Catlin, 1978) in keiner Testbedingung. Außerdem zeigte sich, dass die Kinder Passivsätze insgesamt besser und Aktivsätze insgesamt schlechter verstanden als englischsprachige Kinder in anderen Studien. Die Ergebnisse werden mit dem Competition Modell (Mac Whinney und Bates, 1987) und einer Sprachverarbeitungstheorie von Stromswold (2002) erklärt. Außerdem wird diskutiert, warum die deutschsprachigen Kinder in der vorliegenden Studie andere Sprachverständnisleistungen zeigten als englischsprachige Kinder. / Children acquire passive constructions later than most other syntactic structures. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether this phenomenon can be explained with an information-structural account. In former studies problems in the acquisition of the passive voice have often been attributed to its low input frequency or to its specific syntactic characteristics. However, none of these theories could sufficiently explain the late age of acquisition of passive structures. Sentences in the active voice, the canonical, unmarked, structure in German can be used in any discourse context while passive sentences are almost always used if the patient of the described action is GIVEN in the context and/ or serves as the TOPIC of the sentence. Therefore passive sentences cannot be used in any context without violating information structural constraints. It is more difficult for children – due to their less developed syntactic abilities – than for adults to process sentences which do not occur in an information structurally appropriate context. The present study examines the influence of the context on sentence comprehension abilities of German speaking children. Children at the age of 3;0 – 4;11 years were presented active or passive sentences in an information structurally appropriate, inappropriate or neutral context. As expected, children comprehended active sentences better than passive sentences, and 4-year olds performed better than 3-year olds. There was a tendency that 3-year olds comprehended passive sentences better but active sentences worse if the subject of the sentence was GIVEN in the context. However, there were no statistically significant context effects, in contrast to a similar study with English-speaking children (Gourley and Catlin, 1978). In addition, it could be shown that German-speaking children comprehended passive sentences better than English-speaking children in other studies. The results are explained with the Competition Model (Mac Whinney and Bates, 1987) and Stromswold’s (2002) theory of language processing. It is also discussed why German-speaking children showed different language comprehension abilities than English-speaking children.

Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht die Frage, wie sechsjährige monolingual deutsche Kinder Sätze mit der Fokuspartikel nur interpretieren. In 5 Experimenten wurde untersucht, welchen Einfluss die Oberflächenposition der Fokuspartikel auf das Satzverständnis hat und ob die kontextuelle Einbettung der nur-Sätze zu einer zielsprachlichen Interpretation führt. Im Gegensatz zu den Ergebnissen bisheriger Studien (u.a. Crain, et al. 1994; Paterson et al. 2003) zeigen die Daten der Arbeit, dass die getesteten Kinder die präsentierten nur-Sätze zielsprachlich interpretierten, wenn diese in einen adäquaten Kontext eingebettet waren. Es zeigte sich weiterhin, dass die Kinder mehr Fehler bei der Interpretation von Sätzen mit nur vor dem Subjekt (Nur die Maus hat einen Ball.) als mit nur vor dem Objekt (Die Maus hat nur einen Ball.) machten. Entgegen dem syntaktisch basierten Ansatz von Crain et al. (1994) und dem semantisch-pragmatisch basierten Ansatz von Paterson et al. (2003) werden in der Arbeit informationsstrukturelle Eigenschaften bzw. Unterschiede der nur-Sätze für die beobachteten Leistungen verantwortlich gemacht. Der in der Arbeit postulierte Topik-Default Ansatz nimmt an, dass die Kinder das Subjekt eines Satzes immer als Topik analysieren. Dies führt im Fall der Sätze mit nur vor dem Subjekt zu einer falschen informationsstrukturellen Repräsentation des Satzes. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen der Arbeit und dem postulierten Topik-Default Ansatz wird in der Arbeit abschließend ein Erwerbsmodell für das Verstehen von Sätzen mit der Fokuspartikel nur entworfen und diskutiert. / Challenging previous accounts of children’s comprehension of focus particles, this study investigated how 6-year-old, German-speaking children interpret sentences with the focus particle nur(‘only’). Five experiments examined 1) whether the surface position of the focus particle has an impact on the sentence comprehension and 2) which role an adequate context plays for a target-like interpretation of a nur-sentence. It is known that in English, up to age 7, sentences with only are not interpreted adult-like. Crain et al. (1992) attributed errors to incorrect scope restrictions of the FP; Paterson et al. (2003) argued that children do not process the contrast information and instead ignore the FP. As oppose to previous research, the present data showed that German-speaking children interpret nur-sentences target-like if the sentences were contextually embedded. Furthermore, the results showed that children performed better on nur-object sentences like Die Maus hat nur einen Ball (‘The mouse has only a ball.’) than on nur-subject sentences like Nur die Maus hat einen Ball. (‘Only the mouse has a ball.’). This study argues that the asymmetry in the interpretation of nur-sentences stems from information-structural characteristics. In particular, I postulate the topic-default account which claims that children recognize the subject of the sentence as the topic by default. As a consequence, children assign an incorrect information structure to sentences with nur before the subject. Finally, based on the empirical findings of this study and on the topic-default account, an acquisition model for the comprehension of sentences with the focus particle nur is developed and discussed.

The papers collected in this volume were presented at a Graduate/Postgraduate Student Conference with the title Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory held on December 2 and 3, 2011 at Potsdam-Griebnitzsee. The main goal of the conference was to connect young researchers working on information structure (IS) related topics and to discuss various IS categories such as givenness, focus, topic, and contrast. The aim of the conference was to find at least partial answers to the following questions: What IS categories are necessary? Are they gradient/continuous? How can one deal with optionality or redundancy? How are IS categories encoded grammatically? How do different empirical methods contribute to distinguishing between the influence of different IS categories on language comprehension and production? To answer these questions, a range of languages (Avatime, Chinese, German, Ishkashimi, Modern Greek, Old Saxon, Russian, Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands) and a range of phenomena from phonology, semantics, and syntax were investigated. The presented theories and data were based on different kinds of linguistic evidence: syntactic and semantic fieldwork, corpus studies, and phonological experiments. The six papers presented in this volume discuss a variety of IS categories, such as emphasis and contrast (Stavropoulous, Titov), association with focus and topics (van Putten, Karvovskaya), and givenness and backgrounding (Kimmelmann, Röhr).