In all three primary research domains, I explore the relationship
between linguistic form (syntactic, morphological, phonological, phonetic) and
meaning (semantic or pragmatic), relying to a large extent on data from natural
discourse.
My theoretical assumptions have their basis in generative syntax,
referential & truth conditional semantics, speech act theory & Gricean
pragmatics, and autosegmental-metrical phonology. And I am interested in
exploring how what I learn about the nature of language through my research
fits more generally into research in Cognitive Science.
For the theory of information structure, I primarily follow
Jeanette Gundel and distinguish between relational givenness-newness
(topic-comment) and referential givenness-newness (cognitive status). I am
increasingly interested in formal semantic approaches to focus, topic and
givenness, and to approaches to discourse structure that model discourse as a
question-answer dialogue game or model discourse moves as contributing to a
system of conversational updates to a common ground of propositions mutually
believed by speaker and hearer.
I'm also interested in optimality theoretic approaches to information
structure and the linguistic interfaces, Neo-Gricean and Relevance Theoretic
approaches to pragmatics and its relation to semantics, cognitive linguistics,
tree-adjoining grammar, the Minimalist Program, biolinguistics, and the
relationship between language and music.
In all three research domains, I pursue corpus analysis as a
primary method of obtaining data and deriving generalizations. I have examined
thousands of examples of English cleft sentences and referring expressions in
spoken and written discourse drawn from a variety of sources. I analyze how the meaning of the tokens
I collect relates to their contexts. I have also recently been involved in
annotating by now more than a thousand spoken questions for intonation, while
attempting to figure out how the detailed intonational categories contribute to
the semantic and pragmatic meanings of the utterances. In analyzing any of
these corpus examples, I try to imagine what the speakerÕs intentions were in
producing that utterance in that particular context. I thus try to integrate
the methods of corpus and discourse linguistics with the introspective methods
of generative linguistics.
Ultimately, I like to go beyond the corpus and notice countless examples
as I encounter language in everyday life.
My education consisted of a BA at the University of Minnesota in
Psychology, studying behaviorism and cognitive psychology primarily. (I
trained a rat to stand up in the corner of a Skinner box when a light came on.)
While taking a Psychology of Language course there with James J. Jenkins, I
became interested in linguistics and eventually did my PhD in Linguistics
at the University of Minnesota, supported in part by a pre-doctoral
traineeship in the Center for Research in Human Learning, which has now evolved
into the Center for Cognitive Sciences. My advisors were Jeanette K.
Gundel and Michael
Kac. During my graduate
training I attended two Linguistic
Society of America Linguistic Institutes, at the City University of New York in
1986 and at Stanford University
in 1987. In 1989-90, I held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. As a faculty member, I also attended
the 1997 LSA Institute at Cornell. I have been employed as a faculty member at
SFU since 1990.
IÕm currently working on experimental syntax with Chung-hye Han,
Susannah Kirby, graduate students and local scholars. Our first project is on
the acceptability of relative clauses with resumptive pronouns in English. We will present a poster at WCCFL in
April.
Han, Chung-hye, Susannah Kirby, Marina Dykanova, Noureddine
Elouazizi, Christina Galeano, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ, Nancy Hedberg, Jennifer Hinnell,
Meghan Jeffrey, and Kyeongmin Kim. 2012. "Processing Strategies and
Resumptive Pronouns in English." Poster accepted for presentation at the
West Coast Conference on Linguistics (WCCFL 30). University of California Santa
Cruz, April 13-15, 2012.
We presented our first paper at the LSA in January 2012:
Han, Chung-hye, Susannah Kirby, Marina Dykanova,
Noureddine Elouazizi, Christina Galeano, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ, Nancy Hedberg, Jennifer
Hinnell, Meghan Jeffrey, and Kyeongmin Kim.
2012. ÒSubject-Object Asymmetry in English Resumption.Ó Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, Oregon, January
5-8, 2012.
A 500-word article on complements and adjuncts with Richard
DeArmond came out in Snippets in 2009. Snippets is an on-line journal
that publishes very short articles in syntax and semantics within the
generative framework:
Hedberg, Nancy and Richard C. DeArmond. 2009. "On Complements
and Adjuncts." Snippets 19. 11-12. (longer version)
Two co-edited books have fairly recently appeared.
Gundel, Jeanette K. and Nancy Hedberg (eds.) 2008. Reference: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives. Oxford University Press. New Directions in Cognitive Science
Series. Electronic
Flyer.
Hedberg, Nancy and Ron Zacharski (eds.). 2007. The Grammar-Pragmatics
Interface: Essays in Honor of Jeanette K. Gundel. John Benjamins. Pragmatics
and Beyond New Series. Electronic Flyer. Review
on Linguist List.
These are sentences like "It is beans that I like"
(cleft, or it-cleft), "What I like is beans" (pseudocleft, or
wh-cleft), and "Beans is what I like" (reverse pseudocleft, or
reverse wh-cleft). I have examined
the syntactic structure of clefts and pseudoclefts, their discourse functions,
and to a certain extent their semantics and their prosodic
characteristics. My views on these
aspects of clefts have evolved over the years.
EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS:
Here is the revision of my Berlin cleft paper that is being
published in a John Benjamins volume:
Hedberg,
Nancy. In Press. "Multiple Focus and Cleft Sentences" In Haida,
Andreas, Tonjes Veenstra, and Katharina Hartmann (eds.) The Structure of
Clefts. John Benjamins, Linguistik Aktuell series. (paper).
David Potter and
I presented a paper at Berkeley Linguistics Society in February 2010 on copular
sentences in Thai. We argued that the two copulas of Thai support equative over
inverse analyses of copular sentences. This has implications for clefts. It
also was a nice account of a balance between experimental methods in syntax
(acceptability judgment surveys) and fieldwork-type native speaker
interviews. The proceedings paper
is here.
Hedberg, Nancy and David Potter. 2010. Equative and Predicational Copulas in
Thai. Presented at the Berkeley Linguistics Society. BLS 36, University of
California at Berkeley, Feb. 6-7, 2010. Abstract (pdf).
On November 28, 2008, I presented an invited talk at the Workshop
on Clefts at ZAS in Berlin. Here is the Call for Papers and here is the preliminary program. Here is the handout
(typos corrected).
I have been collaborating with Chung-hye Han on developing a
Tree-Adjoining Grammar analysis of it-clefts, implementing my 2000 analysis of
clefts in this more precise and computationally-constrained framework. We use Tree-Local Multi-Component TAG
to capture the discontinuous relationship between the cleft pronoun and the
cleft clause, and have defined a compositional semantics on the proposed syntax
using Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammar:
Han, Chung-hye and Nancy Hedberg (2008). Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts: a
Tree-Adjoining Grammar Analysis. Journal of Semantics 25. 345-380. Pdf.
Han, Chung-hye and Nancy (2008). Continuous Discontinuity in It-Clefts.
Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia, May 31-June 2, 2008. Powerpoint Slide
Han, Chung-hye and Nancy Hedberg (2006). A Tree-Adjoining Grammar of the Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts.
Proceedings of TAG+8, Sydney, Australia, July 15-16, 2006. Paper
(pdf).
A paper on it-clefts (clefts) and wh-clefts (pseudoclefts) argues
that while in wh-clefts, the cleft clause always expresses the topic of the
sentence with the comment being expressed by the clefted constitutent, in
it-clefts and reverse wh-clefts (inverted pseudoclefts), the initial clefted
constituent can express either the topic or the focus (comment) of the
utterance with the cleft clause expressing the complementary relation. Most of the examples come from the McLaughlin Group:
Hedberg, Nancy and Lorna Fadden. (2007). The Information Structure of It-clefts, Wh-clefts
and Reverse Wh-clefts in English. In Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski
(eds.),The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface: Essays in Honor of Jeanette K.
Gundel. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pragmatics & Beyond New
Series. Pp. 49-76 PrePublication version (pdf)
My graduate student, Tim Choi, completed a master's thesis (Dec.
2006) on Mandarin Chinese sentences that get translated into English as clefts. Library draft (pdf).
This is a thoroughly revised version of two chapters of my
dissertation:
Hedberg, Nancy (2000). The Referential Status of Clefts. Language 76. 891-920. Description.
This is a paper on the syntax of wh-clefts:
Hedberg, Nancy. (1993). "On the Subject-Predicate Structure
of Pseudoclefts," in Mushira Eid and Gregory Iverson, eds. Principles and
Prediction: The Analysis of Natural Language. Papers in Honor of Jerry Sanders.
John Benjamins, 119-134. Description. Pre-publication version (pdf).
This is my dissertation on it-clefts:
Hedberg, Nancy (1990). Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English. Ph.D. dissertation. University of
Minnesota. Description.
This was my first paper on
clefts. I looked at it-clefts, wh-clefts and inverted wh-clefts in episodes of
the McLaughlin Group:
Hedberg, Nancy. 1988. "The
Discourse Function of Cleft Sentences in Spoken English." Linguistic
Society of America Meeting, Dec 1988, New Orleans, Louisiana. Paper.
REFERRING
EXPRESSIONS
These are noun phrases of different forms such as "it",
"the dog", "that dog", "a dog", which can be used
to refer to entities in the discourse model. I have explored the semantic and pragmatic behavior of
referring expressions in two frameworks. I work mainly with Jeanette Gundel and
Ron Zacharski, on cognitive
status, but I have also done some work in the centering
theory framework of Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein.
We propose the 'Givenness Hierarchy' below, arguing that
different forms of referring expressions require that their referents have
different 'cognitive statuses' in the mind of the addressee: in the focus of attention ("in
focus"); in working memory ("activated"); represented in memory
("familiar"), identifiable by the time the noun phrase is processed,
with the representation retrieved from memory or newly constructed
("uniquely identifiable"), or identifiable by the time the sentence
is processed, with the representation retrieved from memory or newly
constructed ("referential").
"Type-identifiable" means that the hearer can identify the
type of object described by the expression. Each status is a necessary condition for the form of
expression associated with it on the hierarchy. The statuses are in a unidirectional
entailment relation, so that a given form can in principle be used when a
higher status obtains, e.g. a the-phrase is often used when the referent is familiar or
activated. However, it is frequently the case that use of a given form triggers
a Gricean quantity implicature that a higher status does not obtain, e.g. use
of an indefinite article often implicates that the referent is not familiar,
and use of a demonstrative pronoun often implicates that the referent is not in
focus.
In
Focus > Activated >
Familiar > Uniquely
Identifiable > Referential > Type Identifiable
it this
that N the N
indefinite this N a N
that
this N
EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS:
Jeanette
Gundel was invited to give an address at the second workshop on reference at
the 2011 Cognitive Science Meeting in Boson. A revison of our TopiCS paper
appeared in the proceedings.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg, and Ron
Zacharski. 2011. ÒUnder-specification of Cognitive Status in Reference
Production: the Grammar-Pragmatics InterfaceÓ, Pre-Cog Sci 2011 Workshop,
ÒBridging the Gap between Computational, Empirical and Theoretical Approaches
to Reference.Ó Boston, Massachusetts, July 20, 2011. Jeanette Gundel, invited
speaker. Proceedings of the Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting. Paper (pdf).
Jeanette Gundel, Ron Zacharski and I have a journal article in
press on the topic of the Givenness Hierarchy, in which we defend our approach
against recent claims in the psycholinguistic literature that the GH is a
salience hierarchy and that there is more to reference than salience. We claim
that the GH is not
a salience hierarchy and that our theory can account for the data presented in
the literature:
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. (In
press). Underpecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some
Empirical Predictions. To appear in Topics in Cognitive Science (TopiCS), issue
on the production of referring expressions: Bridging the gap between
computational and empirical approaches to reference. Manuscript.
In May 2009, my two graduate students, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ and Morgan Mameni, and I
gave a talk at the Canadian Linguistics Association meeting at Carleton
University in Ottawa, Ontario on "Specificity and Definiteness: Evidence
from Turkish and Persian" (slides). We presented a continuation of it at
MOSAIC (Meeting of Semanticists Active in Canada) on May 26 at the University
of Ottawa, with a paper on "More on Specificity and Definiteness in
English, Turkish and Persian" (slides).
Here is the proceedings paper of the CLA talk:
Hedberg, Nancy, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ, and Morgan
Mameni. 2009. On Definiteness and Specificity in Turkish and Persian.
Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic
Association. Paper (pdf).
On March 26, 2008, I gave a talk in the Cognitive Science Program
"Defining Cognitive Science" colloquium series on the Givenness
Hierarchy and its relationship to Philosophy of Language, focusing especially
on articles in Salish languages (sample data)
that I claim should be classified on the Givenness Hierarchy as
"referential". I contrasted our use of that term with that of Kent
Bach in the 2008 Reference
volume. Slides.
May, 2006. Here is
the most recent version of the Coding Protocol for Statuses on the Givenness
Hierarchy, written up by Jeanette Gundel with the help of students and former
students. Protocol. This provides guidance for coding referring expressions in
texts and transcripts with respect to cognitive status categories.
In a series of three DAARC papers from 2002-2007 we examined reference
to Òhigher-orderÓ entities (like events and propositions as opposed to objects)
in light of the Givenness Hierarchy:
Hedberg, Nancy, Jeanette K. Gundel, and Ron Zacharski. 2007.
Directly and Indirectly Anaphoric Demonstrative and Personal Pronouns in
Newspaper Articles. Poster presented at DAARC-2007 (the Sixth Discourse
Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium), Lagos, Portugal, March 29-30,
2007. Paper (pdf). The data come
from the New York Times.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2005.
Pronouns without NP Antecedents: How do we know when a pronoun is
referential? In Antonio Branco, Tony McEnery and Ruslan Mitkov (eds.).
Anaphora Processing: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Modelling. John
Benjamins. 351-364. Abstract. This is a revised
version of the 2002 DAARC paper. The data come from the Santa Barbara Corpus of
American English.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2004.
Demonstrative Pronouns in Natural Discourse. Paper presented at DAARC-2004 (the
Fifth Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium), Sao Miguel,
Portugal, Sept. 23-24, 2004. Paper (pdf).
The data come from the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg,
and Ron Zacharski. 2002. "Pronouns Without Explicit Antecedents: How Do We
Know When a Pronoun is Referential?," Presented at DAARC-4 (the Fourth
Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium), Lisbon, Portugal, Sept.
18-20, 2002. The data come from
the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English. Paper
(pdf). A revision was published as a book chapter in 2005.
In
this paper, we examined definite article phrases with non-familiar referents:
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2001.
"Cognitive Status and Definite Descriptions in English: Why Accommodation
is Unnecessary."
English Language and Linguistics 5. 273-295. Abstract.
Here we examined indirect anaphors in light of the Givenness
Hierarchy.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2000.
"Status Cognitif et Forme des Anaphoriques Indirects. Verbum 22. 79-102. Abstract. English
version (pdf). French version (translated by Francis Cornish)
(pdf).
This was my own attempt to explore the implications of the
Givenness Hierarchy for the Mandarin Chinese determiner system.
Hedberg, Nancy. 1996. "Word Order and Cognitive Status in
Mandarin Discourse," in Reference and Referent Accessibility, ed. by Thorstein Fretheim and
Jeanette Gundel, Pragmatics
and Beyond Series, John Benjamins, 173-192. Prepublication
version (pdf).
This is the first full explication of the Givenness Hierarchy:
Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 1993.
"Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring Expressions in Discourse. Language 69.274-307. Abstract,.
Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 1990.
"Givenness, Implicature and the Form of Referring Expressions in
Discourse," in M. Meacham, et al, eds. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society: Parasession on the Legacy of Grice,
University of California at Berkeley, 442-453. Incorporated into the 1993
Language paper.
Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 1989.
"Givenness, Implicature and Demonstrative Expressions in English
Discourse," in R. Graczyk, et al, eds., Papers from the 25th Annual Regional Meeting
of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasession on Language in Context,
University of Chicago, 89-103. Incorporated into the 1993 Language paper.
Below is the earliest paper on the Givenness Hierarchy. This
paper was conceived as part of a project funded by a grant to Jeanette Gundel
from Control
Data Corporation
for studying discourse anaphora. The research focused on studying demonstrative
expressions in naturally-occurring discourse (including CDC technical reports)
and was inspired by then current computational theories of discourse anaphora:
Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 1988. "On
the Generation and Interpretation of Demonstrative Expressions," in D.
Vargha, ed., Proceedings
of the Twelfth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, John
von Neumann Society for Computing Sciences: Budapest, Hungary, 216-221.
Pdf.
Centering
Theory and Kaqchikel Mayan
Examine this great textbook on Kaqchikel: ÀùLa
Ÿtz awŠch? Initroduction to Kaqchikel Maya Language, by R. McKenna Brown,
Judith M. Maxwell and Walter E. Little.
University of Texas Press. 2006.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2010. Centering and Noun Phrase Realization in
Kaqchikel Mayan. Journal
of Pragmatics, Special Issue on Reference, edited by Thorstein Fretheim,
Kaja Borthen and Heidi Br¿seth. Paper (pdf).
Hedberg, Nancy. 2007.
"Centering and Zero Pronouns in Kaqchikel Mayan." Paper
presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference, Gšteborg,
Sweden, July 12, 2007, as part of panel on "Reference."
Hedberg, Nancy and Sandra Dueck. 1999. "Cakchiquel Reference
and Centering Theory. Proceedings of the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the
Languages of the Americas, University of British Columbia Working Papers in
Linguistics. 59-74. Paper (pdf).
For the last several years, I have been working with Juan Sosa, Lorna Fadden, Sam Al Khatib, Yasuko
Sakurai, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ, Morgan Mameni, and
now Leticia Rebollo Couto and her students at Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro, on the meanings of prosody in North American English and Latin
American Spanish. We are
interested in meanings associated with different sentence types that are
conveyed through prosody. We are
focusing on prosodic properties of questions: both yes-no questions and
wh-questions.
On the one hand, we are interested in speech act meanings (e.g.,
is a polar interrogative sentence used to ask a genuine question or to make a
request or perform another speech act?
Is a declarative sentence used to make an assertion or ask a question?)
and to what extent such speech act meanings are prosodically conveyed. As part of this, we are
interested in accounts of the meaning of interrogative and declarative
utterances in terms of the acts they are used to perform as modeled by theories
of question-answer dialogue games in formal approaches to dynamic semantics/pragmatics
that explicate how utterances of various types can relate to and then change
the common ground.
On the other hand, we are simultaneously interested in
information structural meanings of various sorts (e.g. topic/comment, focus,
contrast, givenness, cognitive status, global discourse structure), and how
these meanings are prosodically conveyed, as well as how they relate to the
dynamic semantic and pragmatic theories mentioned above.
For English, we have been using our version of ToBI to transcribe prosody;
and for Spanish, we will use Spanish ToBI and the
autosegmental transcription system that Juan Sosa has developed for his work on
Spanish. Thus far, we have been
analyzing natural speech drawn from our own McLaughlin
Group corpus the CallHome
Corpus of American English and
the Fisher
English Corpus. We are beginning work on the CallHome
Corpus of Spanish. We are also interested in eventually doing production
and perception experiments in both languages to verify our conclusions.
EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS:
I am currently working with Noureddine Elouazizi on the syntactic
merging, prosodic phrasing and semantic interpretation of parenthetical verb
constructions, such as ÔI thinkÕ and ÔI supposeÕ. The data come from the CallHome and Fisher corpora. We are
going to Paris in May to present a paper on how the prosody of such phrases relates
to their semantics.
Hedberg, Nancy and Noureddine Elouazizi. Accepted. ÒEpistemic
Parenthetical Verbs and Association with FocusÓ. Parenthetical Verbs:
Hypotoxis, Parataxis or Parenthesis? UniversitŽ Ouest Nanterre, Paris. May
23-25, 2012. Abstract.
In 2010, I wrote a review of a book by Laurel Brinton on this
type of construction (also called Ôcomment clausesÕ):
Hedberg, Nancy. 2010. Review of Laurel Brinton. ÒComment ClausesÓ. World Englishes
29(3). 442-445. Review (pdf).
Juan and I went to India in November to the International Seminar
on Prosodic Interfaces:
Hedberg, Nancy and Juan M. Sosa. 2011. ÒA Unified
Account of the Meaning of English Questions with Non-Canonical
Intonation". Presented at the International Seminar on Prosodic
Interfaces, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, November 25-27,
2011. Pre-proceedings paper.
I went to Montreal in September to ETAP-2.
Hedberg, Nancy, Juan M. Sosa and Emrah GšrgŸlŸ.
2011. On the Meaning of Non-Canonical Question IntonationÓ. Poster presented at
Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2, McGill University,
Montreal, QuŽbec, September 23-25, 2011. Poster.
Juan went to Hong Kong in August to the International Congress of
Phonetics Sciences with an oral presentation by the two of us.
Hedberg, Nancy and Juan M. Sosa. 2011. ÒThe Phonetics of Final
Pitch Accents in American English Polar Questions.Ó Proceedings of the
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Hong Kong, August 17-21, 2011. Paper (pdf).
In summer 2010, Morgan Mameni defended his MA thesis that grew
out of the project on the prosody of questions, although it is about biased
questions in English and Persian rather than intonation: MorganÕs
thesis (pdf). Morgan went off
to the Institute for Logic, Language and Information at the University of
Amsterdam to begin a Ph.D. in Inquisitive Semantics.
In summer 2010, we worked with Leticia Rebollo Couto, who was
visiting us on a postdoctoral scholarship from Brazil. With Leticia, we are
working on Spanish question intonation. In this way, based on parallel data in
American English and Spanish, we hope to be able to compare the intonational
systems of the two languages (or rather, dialects thereof) and uncover
similarities and differences in how the two languages encode meaning via
intonation. We are beginning with the Callhome
Spanish Corpus and plan to explore a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews
collected by Juan Sosa aimed at question intonation in various Latin-American
Spanish dialects.
Here is our CLA Proceedings paper.
Hedberg, Nancy, Juan M. Sosa, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ and
Morgan Mameni. 2010. Prosody and Pragmatics of
Wh-Interrogatives. Proceedings of
the 2010 Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association. Paper.
In May 2010, we presented two posters on the intonation and
meaning of wh-questions in the English corpora at Speech Prosody 2010 and CLA
2010. On June 1, we also presented a talk MOSAIC 2. As reported in the
Speech Prosody and CLA papers and posters, Emrah and Morgan came up with a
typology of wh-question dialogue meanings that can be used to explain the difference
between rising and falling wh-questions. The MOSAIC paper expands on the
meaning of rising wh-questions to cover rising wh-questions in general, i.e.
outside the corpus and encountered in everyday life, as well as native speaker
intuitions about the meaning of rising wh-questions in constructed scenarios.
Hedberg, Nancy and Morgan Mameni. 2010. The Semantic Function of
Rising Wh-Questions. Meeting of
Semanticists Active in Canada (MOSAIC 2), McGill University, MontrŽal, QuŽbec,
June 1, 2010. Slides.
Hedberg, Nancy,
Juan M. Sosa, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ and Morgan Mameni. 2010. Prosody and Pragmatics of Wh-Interrogatives. Poster
presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association,
Concordia University, Montreal, QuŽbec, May 29-31, 2010. Poster
(pdf).
Hedberg, Nancy, Juan M. Sosa, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ and Morgan Mameni.
2010. The Prosody and Meaning of Wh-Questions in American English. Speech
Prosody 2010. Chicago, Illinois, May 11-14, 2010. (paper).
In August 2009, the lab had a visit from Noah Constant, PhD student at the
Universitiy of Massachusetts - Amherst. We discussed his masterÕs thesis and
the fall-rise examples from the McLaughlin Group corpus from Hedberg & Sosa
2007.
In May 2008, the lab presented a poster at the 2008 Speech
Prosody conference in Brazil.
Hedberg, Nancy, Juan M. Sosa, and Emrah GšrgŸlŸ.
2008. Early and Late Nuclei in Yes-No Questions: Tails or High Rises? Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008,
Campinas, Brazil, May 2008. Paper (pdf).
In March 2008, Juan presented a version of the
Speech Prosody 2008 paper in Spanish.
Sosa, Juan M. and Nancy Hedberg. 2008. Sem‡ntica
y Entonaci—n de las Preguntas Absolutas del Ingles. ("Semantics and Intonation of Yes-No Questions in
English"). Paper presented at the XX Jornadas LingŸisticas de La
Asociaci—n de LingŸ’stica y Filolog’a de la AmŽrica Latina (ALFAL), Caracas,
Venezuela, March 6-9, 2008.
In February 2008, Lorna Fadden defended her Ph.D. thesis on the prosody
of police suspect speech during police interviews.
In July 2007, the lab had a visit from Malcah Yaeger-Dror. We
collaborated together on a project comparing social and information-structural
factors on the accentedness of negative elements like not and AUX+nt in McLaughlin Group conversations, political
debates and CallFriend
conversations, using transcripts for the latter that Malcah has made available
on TalkBank. We presented a paper together
on this at the Linguistic Society of America meeting in Chicago, January 2008: abstract. Slides
(pdf).
In June 2007, I gave a talk on ÒYes-No Questions,
Information Structure and ProsodyÓ at the LIPP Symposium on Clause Syntax,
Information Structures, and Discourse Pragmatics in Munich, Germany. Here is the
presentation handout for
that talk (pdf).
In April 2007, Juan Sosa and I received Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant
$410-2007-0345 to work on ÒThe Prosody of
Sentence Types and Information Structure in North American English.Ó
During the first two years of the grant, we studied meanings associated with
the intonation of positive yes-no quetoins from the CallHome Corpus of American
English and the Fisher English Corpus. During the third and fourth years, we
have been study the meanings of different intonation contours on wh-questions
from the same corpora. For both projects, we annotated the questions according
to our version of the ToBI transcription system, and have tried to identify
meanings associated with the different intonation patterns. Here is a summary of the grant.
In January, 2007, the 2001 LSA topic and Focus
Workshop paper was published.
Hedberg, Nancy and Juan M.
Sosa. 2007. The Prosody of Topic
and Focus in Spontaneous English Dialogue. In Chungmin Lee, Mathew Gordon, and
Daniel Buring, (eds.), Topic and Focus: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and
Intonation. Dordrecht:
Springer. 101-120 .Pre-final
version (pdf)
In 2006 came the publication of my report on
the 2001 Topic and Focus paper and the 2002 Speech Prosody paper, taking into
consideration some of the criticism that we received for the original
conference papers. This was first presented at the Lund, Sweden workshop on
Information Strucutre and Contrast, Dec. 6-8, 2002, and was itself a revision
of the Stuttgart paper (Hedberg 2003 below):
Hedberg, Nancy. 2006. Topic-Focus Controversies. In Valeria
Molnar and Susanne Winkler (eds.), The Architecture of Focus. Mouton de Gruyter. Paper (pdf).
In May 2006, we presented a poster at Speech
Prosody in Dresden: Hedberg, Nancy, Juan
M. Sosa and Lorna Fadden. 2006. "Tonal Constituents and Meanings of Yes-No
Questions in American English. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden, Germany. Paper (pdf).
In February 2004, I gave a talk at the
University of British Columbia on the ÒepistemicÓ meanings of polar questions
of various positive and negative forms in the CallHome Corpus. The goal was to
figure out what aspects of meaning the question form itself contributes, so
that we could later see what added nuances prosody contributes. The talk
included a literature review. Here is the handout
from that talk. (pdf).
Hedberg, Nancy, Juan M. Sosa and
Lorna Fadden. 2004. "Meanings and Configurations of Questions in
English". Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan. Paper (PDF).
Hedberg, Nancy, Juan M. Sosa and
Lorna Fadden. 2003. "The Intonation of Contradictions in American
English." Paper presented at Pragmatics and Prosody. North West Conference
on Linguistics, University of Southern Lancashire, Preston, England, Nov. 2003.
Paper (PDF).
Hedberg, Nancy and Juan M. Sosa.
2003. "Pitch Contours in Negative Sentences." Poster presented at the
15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 3-9,
2003. Paper (PDF).
Hedberg, Nancy. 2002.
"Topic-Focus Controversies," presented at the symposium
"Informationstruktur - kontrastivt", Lund, Sweden, Dec. 6-8, 2002.
Published as a book chapter 2006.
Hedberg,
Nancy. 2002. The prosody of contrastive topic and focus in spoken English. Pre-proceedings
of the workshop on information structure in context, 14 –52.
Stuttgart: Institut fŸr
Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung.. Paper (PDF)
Hedberg,
Nancy and Juan M. Sosa. 2002. "The Prosody of Questions in Natural
Discourse." Proceedings
of Speech Prosody 2002 (the First International Conference on Speech Prosody),
Aix-en-Provence, France, 375-378. Paper (PDF)
Hedberg, Nancy and Juan M. Sosa.
2001. "The Prosodic Structure of Topic and Focus in Spontaneous English
Dialogue." Topic and Focus: A Workshop on Intonation and Meaning.
University of California, Santa Barbara, Linguistic Society of America, Institute
of Linguistics, July 2001. Published as a book chapter 2007.
Sosa, Juan M. and Nancy Hedberg.
2001. "The Prosody of Topic and Focus in Spanish." Linguistic
Symposium on Romance Languages XXXI, University of Illinois at Chicago, April,
2001.
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. Paper (PDF)
Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg,
and Ron Zacharski. 1995. "Prosodic Tune and Information Structure,"
in Proceedings
of the 1995 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association,
University of Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 215-223. First draft of Helsinki paper presented
in 1997.