Cette thèse présente une étude expérimentale de la relation entre l'annotation des formes et des fonctions prosodiques en anglais britannique. Elle porte essentiellement sur le rôle de l'intonation dans la communication orale et le codage de cette contribution dans un système d'annotation. Elle se divise en deux grandes parties : une partie théorique proposant une revue de lecture analytique des principaux ouvrages portant sur l'intonation et faisant le point sur la façon dont la question de la relation forme/sens a été abordée dans le passé et une partie expérimentale décrivant la nouvelle méthodologie développée pour étudier cette thématique et les résultats obtenus. Cette méthodologie est basée sur le traitement automatique des données par l'intermédiaire de scripts, sur l'étude de deux grands corpus oraux (EUROM1 et Aix-MARSEC) et sur une procédure d'analyse par synthèse permettant de tester différentes théories de l'intonation et de les évaluer.

The study sheds light on the interrelations between interlanguage pragmatics and the use of a popular acting method, the Stanislavsky System, for second language (L2) acquisition. The theoretical investigation explores various uses of acting in second language education. The empirical enquiry represents an exploratory case-study of two adult EFL learners attending a theatre course in English. Through teacher journals, interviews, and the analysis of the students’ pragmatic performance as captured by a video camera, the researcher hypothesizes that the pragmatic development of the students involved in drama comes from three main sources: the script, the acting exercises, and the necessity to communicate in English during the theatre course. In all three cases, the zone of proximal development in relation to pragmatic competence emerged as a result of a teacher-generated impetus to use L2, numerous opportunities for imitation and repetition, continuous peer-support, and the collaborative spirit created in the classroom.

The study sheds light on the interrelations between interlanguage pragmatics and the use of a popular acting method, the Stanislavsky System, for second language (L2) acquisition. The theoretical investigation explores various uses of acting in second language education. The empirical enquiry represents an exploratory case-study of two adult EFL learners attending a theatre course in English. Through teacher journals, interviews, and the analysis of the students’ pragmatic performance as captured by a video camera, the researcher hypothesizes that the pragmatic development of the students involved in drama comes from three main sources: the script, the acting exercises, and the necessity to communicate in English during the theatre course. In all three cases, the zone of proximal development in relation to pragmatic competence emerged as a result of a teacher-generated impetus to use L2, numerous opportunities for imitation and repetition, continuous peer-support, and the collaborative spirit created in the classroom.

Learning to play a musical instrument is a daunting task. Musicians must execute unusual physical movements within very tight tolerances, and must continually adjust their bodies in response to auditory feedback. However, most beginners lack the ability to accurately evaluate their own sound. We therefore turn to computers to analyze the student's performance. By extracting certain information from the audio, computers can provide accurate and objective feedback to students. This thesis lays out some general principles for such projects, and introduces tools to help practicing rhythms and violin intonation. There are three distinct portions to this research: automatic exercise creation, audio analysis, and visualization of errors. Exercises were created with Constraint Satisfaction Programming, audio analysis was performed with amplitude and pitch detection, and errors were displayed with a novel graphical interface. This led to the creation of MEAWS, an open-source program for music students.

The term prosody refers to characteristics of speech such as intonation, timing, loudness, and other acoustical properties imposed by physical, intentional and emotional state of the speaker. Phone durations and fundamental frequency contours are considered as two of the most prominent aspects of prosody. Modeling phone durations and fundamental frequency contours in Turkish speech are studied in this thesis. Various methods exist for building prosody models. State-of-the-art is dominated by corpus-based methods. This study introduces corpus-based approaches using classification and regression trees to discover the relationships between prosodic attributes and phone durations or fundamental frequency contours. In this context, a speech corpus, designed to have specific phonetic and prosodic content has been recorded and annotated. A set of prosodic attributes are compiled. The elements of the set are determined based on linguistic studies and literature surveys. The relevances of prosodic attributes are investigated by statistical measures such as mutual information and information gain. Fundamental frequency contour and phone duration modeling are handled as independent problems. Phone durations are predicted by using regression trees where the set of prosodic attributes is formed by forward selection. Quantization of phone durations is studied to improve prediction quality. A two-stage duration prediction process is proposed for handling specific ranges of phone duration values. Scaling and shifting of predicted durations are proposed to minimize mean squared error. Fundamental frequency contour modeling is studied under two different frameworks. One of them generates a codebook of syllable-fundamental-frequency-contours by vector quantization. The codewords are used to predict sentence fundamental frequency contours. Pitch accent prediction by two different clustering of codewords into accented and not-accented subsets is also considered in this framework. Based on the experience, the other approach is initiated. An algorithm has been developed to identify syllables having perceptual prominence or pitch accents. The slope of fundamental frequency contours are then predicted for the syllables identified as accented. Pitch contours of sentences are predicted using the duration information and estimated slope values. Performance of the phone duration and fundamental frequency contour models are evaluated quantitatively using statistical measures such as mean absolute error, root mean squared error, correlation and by kappa coefficients, and by correct classification rate in case of discrete symbol prediction.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2007. / Typescript. Includes 2 sound discs and 1 DVD-ROM in back pocket. CD 1: The animation of lists; CD 2: And the archytan transpositions. DVD-ROM contains Part Three - Appendix. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 291-301.

The need for interacting with machines using spoken natural language is growing, along with the expectation that synthetic speech in this context sound natural. Such interaction includes answering questions, where prosody plays an important role in producing natural English synthetic speech by communicating the information structure of utterances. CCG is a theoretical framework that exploits the notion that, in English, information structure, prosodic structure and syntactic structure are isomorphic. This provides a way to convert a semantic representation of an utterance into a prosodically natural spoken utterance. GF is a framework for writing grammars, where abstract tree structures capture the semantic structure and concrete grammars render these structures in linearised strings. This research combines these frameworks to develop a system that converts semantic representations of utterances into linearised strings of natural language that are marked up to inform the prosody-generating component of a speech synthesis system. / Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

The aim of the thesis was to design an analytical model enabling a comparative analysis of both original and dubbed versions of film dialogues, with special regard to prosodic interference (intonation in particular), to describe and explain such interference, caused by certain differences between Czech and English, and to assess its influence on communication, considering the nature of a film character and its reception by Czech recipients. The analysis showed that higher pitch register and extended intonation range were the most common types of interference, bringing about the impression of over-emotive and over-melodious speech and also changing some of the film characters. These types of interference were caused by a different way of using intonation within the system of a language; English uses intonation to signal information structure and to express emotions as well. Interesting results were obtained when a structural approach to a character, as proposed by Jiří Levý (1971), was applied in the analysis. Surprisingly, another type of interference was discovered; it is a sort "indirect" interference developed in cases when the dubbed version closely follows the original and its dominant prosodic features and uses them in situations where the original does not. Such interference is changing the...

Este estudo tem como proposta identificar, a partir da observação da linguagem utilizada pelo professor em sala de aula, aspectos da entoação no texto oral acadêmico que justifiquem uma relação valorativa entre autoria e prosódia. Partimos da concepção de que o sujeito se constitui autor do seu dizer, uma vez que ele se posiciona, assumindo, assim, um discurso apreciativo em sua enunciação. Esse fato é passivo de constatação ao delinearmos de que forma se dá o conhecimento das relações identificatórias estabelecidas entre sujeitos por meio da escolha de recursos linguísticos prosódicos, elementos que caracterizam o processo de construção da autoria no contexto acadêmico. Examina-se a ocorrência desses elementos prosódicos na construção do sentido nos textos orais produzidos pelo sujeito professor em sala de aula a partir da produção de seu discurso, fruto de releituras do conteúdo a ser abordado em aulas. O presente trabalho se fundamenta no conceito de Autoria descrito por Bakhtin (1990; 2003) e na Teoria Interacional da Entoação desenvolvida por David Brazil (1981; 1985). Foram analisados discursos de dois professores em sua estrutura, contexto comunicativo, intenção do falante, grau de hierarquia entre os participantes e quanto à presença e influência dos fatores prosódicos. Conclui-se que a identificação de marcas constitutivas da autoria ressalta a necessidade de observação da habilidade prosódica do professor locutor ao lidar com a linguagem, enfatizando a prática de um discurso orientado responsivo, em que a apreciação seja instrumento que fornece ao falante o poder de reorganizar o próprio pensamento em favor do que é enunciado. Propõe-se, portanto, a construção de discursos mais apreciativos e menos significativos que auxiliem na focalização do sentido pretendido como objetivo dos conteúdos abordados em sala de aula, de forma que o sujeito professor adquira o poder de exercer seu discurso de maneira autêntica, produzindo conhecimento muito mais do que, meramente, reproduzindo conhecimento dentro do contexto acadêmico

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-01-13T14:02:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1046542 bytes, checksum: 1b73e3e202f7d4c9a57576066c51c794 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-13T14:02:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1046542 bytes, checksum: 1b73e3e202f7d4c9a57576066c51c794 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-26 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This research investigates the manner of how a defensive lawyer, in the Court, evaluates the social auditorium as well as how this evaluation stablishes the language style used for creating an entry-conscience into the jury. From this perspective, the objective of this study is to verify, in the criminal defense, how the defense lawyer’s discourse is influenced by the social auditorium. Thus, to support the research, they were used the theoretical-methodological bases of Dialogical Theory of Language (DTL) established by Bakhtin’s Circle, Voloshinov ([1976]); Voloshinov ([2005]); Bakhtin/Volochínov (2009); Bakhtin (2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011, 2012). To explain and interpret the facts they were used the principles of the qualitative-interpretative research. The corpus is consisted of one (01) criminal defense that happened in Court of Guarabira-PB town. The choice of the criminal defense was carried out due to the possibilities of evaluative intonations that were found in the lawyer’s defensive discourse. In the sample they could be stablished seven (07) categories of evaluative intonations. The analyses have evidenced that, from the evaluative intonations, the lawyer uses some discursive strategies established by a language style characterized of subjective constitution. / Esta pesquisa reflete a maneira como a advogada de defesa, no Tribunal do Júri, avalia o seu auditório social e como essa avaliação estabelece o estilo de linguagem usado para criar uma consciência de adesão no corpo de jurados. Sob este ângulo, o objetivo da pesquisa investiga, na defesa criminal, como o discurso da advogada é influenciado pelo auditório social. Assim, para dar sustentação teórica à pesquisa, foram abordados os pressupostos teóricometodológicos da Teoria Dialógica da Linguagem (TDL), principalmente os que foram preconizados pelo Círculo bakhtiniano, Voloshinov ([1976]); Voloshinov ([2005]); Bakhtin/Volochínov (2009); Bakhtin (2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011, 2012). Para explicar e interpretar os fatos/dados, foram usados os princípios da pesquisa qualitativa interpretativista. O corpus consta de uma (01) defesa criminal que aconteceu no Tribunal do Júri da Comarca de Guarabira – PB. A escolha dessa defesa criminal deu-se devido às possibilidades de ocorrência das entoações avaliativas encontradas na forma de dizer da advogada em direção ao seu auditório social. Na amostra foram constatadas sete (07) categorias de entoações avaliativas. As análises têm evidenciado que, a partir dessas entoações avaliativas, a advogada usa algumas estratégias discursivas estabelecidas por um estilo de linguagem característico da constituição de subjetividade.