I think I previously discussed my idea for an ASL/English/partial relex. I stumbled on some information for English's discourse intonation patterns since then and I have also thought about the general prosodic patterns, and I think I have an answer. Like many things, it's synergy
English's uptalk pattern is interesting and somewhat novel and alien. I have thought about it before, but it seems ideal here after all, not just as a joke.
The thing about uptalk, is how it is so full of filler and unusual rhetorical tricks. Vocal fry goes hand in hand. Someone said it sounds really aggressive and I would agree. It is ideal for a conlang because people revel in it, who use it, and it's empowering, and it holds the floor wonderfully. It's not some wimpy speech thing, it's demanding and pushy. When that's coupled with language learners demanding to be given the floor and hold it, it is both obnoxious and charming.
The pacing is especially useful, because the rate of speech of someone talking is rather slow, often, and not that diversified. Using filler words like "thing(y)" and "stuff" is great for learners too. Uptalk and slang are where I would rather be, and I think they represent the turning of 2000 years of argument centering around explicit logical form and argumentation. Now it's back to informality and tribalism.
Uptalk reminds me of questioning speech that invites the listener in, but also the continuation pattern in English, like in French at the end of prosodic words (coincidence?)--meaning it might seem like an invitation, but it's possibly just the speaker stalling for time, like a tag "um" or "y'know".
Friday, May 17, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Intonational collocations, tropes & memes
Hi all!
I'm trying to do more with the wiki again. It's just there's so much material. Do I start with Bolinger? Where do I start with the wiki? I wish I could get some sense of the overall structure. I think I will have to begin with ToBI's structure anyways. Arnold's notation is somewhat convenient but it isn't as interesting as it should be. Bolinger has 3 basic structures but lots of micro prosodic variation that doesn't show up again 'til we get back to IVIE or RAP e.g. pitch shifting.
It's hard to get to a critical mass. I want to get enough going that other people can run with it and see it develop a life of its own...but other people won't do your work for you. I'm also concerned about making sure I don't borrow too much in fair use. Fortunately most of the ideas are easy to extend.
What can other people do? A lot actually. Intonation should be intuitive; lots of people remember movie lines and can come up with more examples pretty easily when they hear one example. For instance listening to the 3rd column (HL%) here it is pretty easy to tell that the overall theme sounds very much like boredom or exasperation/irritation. It's not much stretch to hear a little kid saying some of those things, e.g. Ralphie from "A Christmas Story" or some of the sassy girls from "Mean Girls"; and from there to produce a specific quote someone can find via youtube or by renting a movie.
Another concern is easily loading and hosting audio files from my device. SoundHost doesn't cut it because they want to play all the sounds in your album instead of just one at a time.
I've found a very good book called "Prosody & Meaning" which has a fantastic article about lexicalization of pitch contours. As it turns out, they're essentially memes. This changes a lot of things, if micro prosodic variation is really so shifty. It means there's likely to be no underlying structure, and the rest is fashion. But, the authors point out that the same system that operates on focus and topicalization phenomena operates on the discourse functions, which include back channel responses, tags, etc. Which means that, very frequently, structures reappear just because without much meaning. They give the example of "meatball" and "school" showing up often with stereotyped patterns.
They discuss other things like upstep and how it probably belongs in ToBI, and how pitch scaling may or may not matter. Other articles discuss how well-formed and discrete categories in intonation actually are. Turns out, not very. They're very slippery, and in fact TOBI categories appear to bleed into each other. Hence the usefulness of a exemplar-based theory of lexicalization, where lexemes come with a few available patterns. It also makes me wonder whether its worthwhile having a theory only so far as it helps organize the data. Too bad the data is so thorny, otherwise we might already have a TVtropes-styled wiki...Oh wait, I made one (it's just not useful yet.)
Cheers!
I'm trying to do more with the wiki again. It's just there's so much material. Do I start with Bolinger? Where do I start with the wiki? I wish I could get some sense of the overall structure. I think I will have to begin with ToBI's structure anyways. Arnold's notation is somewhat convenient but it isn't as interesting as it should be. Bolinger has 3 basic structures but lots of micro prosodic variation that doesn't show up again 'til we get back to IVIE or RAP e.g. pitch shifting.
It's hard to get to a critical mass. I want to get enough going that other people can run with it and see it develop a life of its own...but other people won't do your work for you. I'm also concerned about making sure I don't borrow too much in fair use. Fortunately most of the ideas are easy to extend.
What can other people do? A lot actually. Intonation should be intuitive; lots of people remember movie lines and can come up with more examples pretty easily when they hear one example. For instance listening to the 3rd column (HL%) here it is pretty easy to tell that the overall theme sounds very much like boredom or exasperation/irritation. It's not much stretch to hear a little kid saying some of those things, e.g. Ralphie from "A Christmas Story" or some of the sassy girls from "Mean Girls"; and from there to produce a specific quote someone can find via youtube or by renting a movie.
Another concern is easily loading and hosting audio files from my device. SoundHost doesn't cut it because they want to play all the sounds in your album instead of just one at a time.
I've found a very good book called "Prosody & Meaning" which has a fantastic article about lexicalization of pitch contours. As it turns out, they're essentially memes. This changes a lot of things, if micro prosodic variation is really so shifty. It means there's likely to be no underlying structure, and the rest is fashion. But, the authors point out that the same system that operates on focus and topicalization phenomena operates on the discourse functions, which include back channel responses, tags, etc. Which means that, very frequently, structures reappear just because without much meaning. They give the example of "meatball" and "school" showing up often with stereotyped patterns.
They discuss other things like upstep and how it probably belongs in ToBI, and how pitch scaling may or may not matter. Other articles discuss how well-formed and discrete categories in intonation actually are. Turns out, not very. They're very slippery, and in fact TOBI categories appear to bleed into each other. Hence the usefulness of a exemplar-based theory of lexicalization, where lexemes come with a few available patterns. It also makes me wonder whether its worthwhile having a theory only so far as it helps organize the data. Too bad the data is so thorny, otherwise we might already have a TVtropes-styled wiki...Oh wait, I made one (it's just not useful yet.)
Cheers!
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Intonation of English
I should just change this blog's title to English Intonation.
I've been reading things written in ToBI and it's hard. There just aren't great pedagogical resources for learning ToBI. The MIT course, this chart, etc.
This article in the recently published 'Prosody & Meaning' is impressive in that it establishes the existence of a variety of lexico-accentual collocations (aka tropes) in the English vocabulary. This is significant; it means that intonational theory doesn't have to focus on abstract examples as much as exemplars, which tend to have very specific meaning tied to them. This is an approach to grammar I really do enjoy, and you see it pop up in conlangs sometimes e.g. Kalusa. They also point out that the accents, besides being prominent in terms of discourse functions, also recur in ordinary words; Calhoun, the author, points out that 'meatball' and 'government' have very particular and common contours that don't seem to have a discourse function; that's just how they're most often said. This is a fantastic insight, & it has all kinds of implications for learning languages. They didn't get too much into boundary tones (not at all in fact); they also pointed out various trouble spots with regards to ToBI analyses (e.g. speakers' ranges effecting perception of local maxima, upstep's neglect). The greatest boon was listing the tables of profiles & the words that fit into them. I think using the list could help make a writer more accessible, and I'm going to see if I can't get this kind of thing into TVTropes. These clever turns of speech are just too much to ignore; and though I think speech gets short shrift on TVT, I think this may be a chance to really improve that.
I'm also looking into making a comic but I don't think I have the time or the will. I also don't have a story right now that isn't one of those "Gee whiz! Why don't I..."-derivative things. I think something is cool until I get down to it and I realize I don't feel strongly about it--or even writing, for that matter.
I was looking into 3D software anyway and I realized there are a lot of mediocre webcomics that use CG. I think it's because they never spend more than 15 minutes on the visuals or the plot; perhaps too, CG is too demanding and they get roped into designing too much background. The characters are also unattractive. Not too mention, emotionless. Unremarkable. The camera focus is usually in need of a lot tweaking. CG is one of those things where I feel like there should be several drafts and therefore several people involved telling you what looks bad, at least. It shouldn't be too hard to do those drafts on the other hand though. If there's one thing about CG, it's that no-one appreciates how much really work actually goes into it. No-work comics with stick-figure art usually at least have punch lines though, and most CG comics are serious rather than humorous. The thing about both bad stick art and mediocre CG is that they're both really consistently something on one level (for stick art, it's its inconsistency) while for CG it's consistent but it's consistently not what it's supposed to be representing.
Hey, there isn't any reason why a very mixed style a la Klimt shouldn't work. Or Sealab.
I've been reading things written in ToBI and it's hard. There just aren't great pedagogical resources for learning ToBI. The MIT course, this chart, etc.
This article in the recently published 'Prosody & Meaning' is impressive in that it establishes the existence of a variety of lexico-accentual collocations (aka tropes) in the English vocabulary. This is significant; it means that intonational theory doesn't have to focus on abstract examples as much as exemplars, which tend to have very specific meaning tied to them. This is an approach to grammar I really do enjoy, and you see it pop up in conlangs sometimes e.g. Kalusa. They also point out that the accents, besides being prominent in terms of discourse functions, also recur in ordinary words; Calhoun, the author, points out that 'meatball' and 'government' have very particular and common contours that don't seem to have a discourse function; that's just how they're most often said. This is a fantastic insight, & it has all kinds of implications for learning languages. They didn't get too much into boundary tones (not at all in fact); they also pointed out various trouble spots with regards to ToBI analyses (e.g. speakers' ranges effecting perception of local maxima, upstep's neglect). The greatest boon was listing the tables of profiles & the words that fit into them. I think using the list could help make a writer more accessible, and I'm going to see if I can't get this kind of thing into TVTropes. These clever turns of speech are just too much to ignore; and though I think speech gets short shrift on TVT, I think this may be a chance to really improve that.
I'm also looking into making a comic but I don't think I have the time or the will. I also don't have a story right now that isn't one of those "Gee whiz! Why don't I..."-derivative things. I think something is cool until I get down to it and I realize I don't feel strongly about it--or even writing, for that matter.
I was looking into 3D software anyway and I realized there are a lot of mediocre webcomics that use CG. I think it's because they never spend more than 15 minutes on the visuals or the plot; perhaps too, CG is too demanding and they get roped into designing too much background. The characters are also unattractive. Not too mention, emotionless. Unremarkable. The camera focus is usually in need of a lot tweaking. CG is one of those things where I feel like there should be several drafts and therefore several people involved telling you what looks bad, at least. It shouldn't be too hard to do those drafts on the other hand though. If there's one thing about CG, it's that no-one appreciates how much really work actually goes into it. No-work comics with stick-figure art usually at least have punch lines though, and most CG comics are serious rather than humorous. The thing about both bad stick art and mediocre CG is that they're both really consistently something on one level (for stick art, it's its inconsistency) while for CG it's consistent but it's consistently not what it's supposed to be representing.
Hey, there isn't any reason why a very mixed style a la Klimt shouldn't work. Or Sealab.
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