CLEFTS, PSEUDOCLEFTS, AND COPULA
CONSTRUCTIONS
REFERRING EXPRESSIONS
PROSODY AND MUSIC
I work in three primary research domains:
clefts and other copula constructions, referring expressions, and prosody. In
each of them, 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 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, construction grammar, 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 several 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 and several hundred parenthetical expressions 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.
In addition, I currently pursue experimental methods to studying
grammaticality, acceptability and processing through my collaborations in
Chung-hye Han and Keir MoultonÕs Experimental
Syntax Lab.
My education consisted of a BA at the University of Minnesota in Psychology in
1979, 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 1990 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. Later, I also attended the 1997 LSA
Institute at Cornell. I have been employed as a faculty member at SFU since
1990.
In my first year as an undergraduate at
the University of Minnesota in 1974-75, I was part of an innovative first-year
cohort program on ÒThe Arts, Language and the MindÓ (or something like that). I
took Linguistics, Philosophy, Humanities, Art History, Music History, and
Psychology as part of that program in my first year. That program was a very
interesting incipient Cognitive Science program, and I am still interested in
the synthesis of those issues today. Thus, for example, in 2012, 2013 and 2014
I have taught a cognitive science course on Òlanguage, music and cognition.Ó
That course has led to interests in the structure of music cross-culturally,
the evolution of language and cognition, and correlates of music and language
in other animals.
Noureddine Elouazizi and I presented a
paper on the syntax of parenthetical verb phrases in Moroccan Arabic at the
2014 Chicago Linguistics Society meeting.
Elouazizi, Noureddine
and Nancy Hedberg. 2014. ÒSubjects and the Structural
Licensing of Parenthetical Verb Phrases in Moroccan ArabicÓ. Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, University
of Chicago, April 10-12, 2014.
I published a review in Language of Betty
BirnerÕs Introduction to Pragmatics textbook.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2013.
Review of Introduction to Pragmatics by Betty J. Birner. Language 89. 953-957.
IÕm also currently working on
experimental syntax with Chung-hye Han, Keir Moulton and graduate students in
the Experimental Syntax Lab. One project
has to do with the acceptability and processing of resumptive pronouns in
relative clauses.
Han, Chung-hye, Mathieu Dovan,
Noureddine Elouazizi, Nancy Hedberg, Meghan Jeffrey, Kyeongmin Kim, and Keir
Moulton. 2013, ÒA self-paced
reading study of resumptive relative clauses in English.Ó Presented at the
Canadian Linguistics Association meeting, University of Victoria, June 1-3,
2013.
Han, Chung-hye, Noureddine Elouazizi, Christina Galeano, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ,
Nancy Hedberg, Jennifer Hinnell, Meghan Jeffrey, Kyeongmin Kim and Susannah
Kirby. 2012. "Processing Strategies and Resumptive Pronouns in
English." Proceedings of WCCFL 30. New York: Cascadilla Press. Paper.
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
presented at the West Coast Conference on Linguistics (WCCFL 30). University of
California Santa Cruz, April 13-15, 2012. Poster.
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.
IÕm working on the syntax, semantics and
prosody of parenthetical verbs in English with Noureddine Elouazizi. Here is a
paper that Noureddine presented at the Canadian Linguistics Association 2012
that has to do purely with syntax.
Elouazizi, Noureddine and Nancy Hedberg.
2012. A derivational analysis of the syntax of parenthetical verb phrases in
English. Paper presented at the 2012 Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics
Association, May 26-28, 2012.
Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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 were published.
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.
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).
I studied Kaqchikel at the University of
Minnesota in two field methods courses taught by Nancy Stenson in 1981 and
1983-84. I worked afterwards on my course paper for that (first) class and
present here the version that I came up with as I was leaving Minnesota in
1988. I was very intrigued by the voice and agreement systems in Kaqchikel
(including syntactic patterns of suppressed ergative agreement on the verb that
are now called Agent Focus) and by how information structure factors affect
syntax.
Hedberg, Nancy. 1988.
ÒDiscourse function, ergativity, and agreement in Cakchiquel MayanÓ. Paper.
CLEFTS,
PSEUDOCLEFTS, AND COPULA CONSTRUCTIONS
Clefts 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.
I am now working on situating clefts
within the study of copula-type sentences more generally, and on studying
cross-linguistic properties of copula-type sentences. I am collaborating with Patricia
Schneider-Zioga, Mara
Katz, Wafa
Al-Ali, John Lyon
and David Potter
on this project. We apply generative syntax and type-theoretic formal semantics
in our analysis, taking into consideration context and information structure
(topic and focus).
EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS:
The copulas project has received a SSHRC
Small Grant from Simon Fraser University:
Hedberg, Nancy. 2015. The Syntax and
Semantics of Copula Sentences in Thai. SSHRC Small Grant. 2015-2017.
The team had two important conference
presentations:
Hedberg, Nancy and Patricia Schneider-Zioga. 2015. ÒPredication,
Specification and Information Structure in Kinande.Ó Poster presented at GLOW
38 (Generative Linguistics of the Old World), April 15-18, 2015. Paris, France.
Abstract. Poster.
Schneider-Zioga, Patricia and Nancy Hedberg. 2015. ÒPredication and Specification in KinandeÓ
Poster presented at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 33)
March 27-29, 2015, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Abstract.
John Lyon gave a colloquium in the
Linguistics Department on copular sentences in Okanagan Salish:
Lyon, John. 2014. Identifying
Identificational Sentences in Okanagan Salish. SFU
Linguistics Department Colloquium. November 27, 2015. Abstract.
I gave a preliminary talk at SFU on the
general copula project when professors and graduate students from Jawaharlal Nehru University
were visiting our department in June 2014. Handout.
I commented on two papers on clefts in
British Columbia languages at SULA 8, the Semantics of Underrepresentated Languages
of the Americas, which was held at University of British Columbia on May 16-18,
2014. Information on this
conference can be found here.
Here is the revision of my Berlin cleft
paper that has been published in a John Benjamins volume:
Hedberg, Nancy. 2013.
"Multiple Focus and Cleft Sentences" In Hartmann, Katharina and
Tonjes Veenstra (eds.) Cleft Structures. 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.
IÕm working with Maite Taboada
and Noureddine Elouazizi on demonstrative expressions accompanied by pointing
gestures.
Elouazizi, Noureddine, Maite Taboada and Nancy Hedberg. 2013. ÒOstensive
demonstratives in multimodal contexts.Ó Paper presented at the International
Congress of Linguists (ICL19). Geneva, Switzerland, July 21-27, 2013.
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, Kaja Borthen and I have
written an article on reference for the Oxford Handbook on Reference.
Hedberg, Nancy, Jeanette K. Gundel, and Kaja Borthen. Forthcoming. On Different Senses of ÔReferentialÕ. To appear in The
Oxford Handbook on Reference, edited by Jeanette K. Gundel and Barbara Abbott. Oxford University Press. Prepublication
version (pdf).
Jeanette Gundel and I have written a book
chapter. In this chapter, we defend the Givenness Hierarchy against the charge
that it over-predicts scalar implicatures, and we talk a little bit more than
before about typology and languages other than English.
"Reference and Cognitive Status: Implicature and Typology."
2016. In Ferrnandez-Vest, M. M. Jocelyne and Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., eds. Information Structure and Spoken Language in a
Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Mouton de Gruyter. 33-53.
Prepublication version (pdf).
I presented a paper on the Givenness
Hierarchy at a Tokyo conference. Here
are the proceedings of the conference.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2014. Applying the
Givenness Hierarchy Framework: Methodological Issues. Paper presented at
Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on the Information Structures of Austronesian
Languages. Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Dec. 13-15, 2013. Paper.
Jeanette Gundel, Ron Zacharski and I
published a journal article 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. 2012. Underpecification of Cognitive Status in Reference
Production: Some Empirical Predictions. Topics in Cognitive
Science (TopiCS) 4(2), 249-268. Issue on: The production of referring expressions:
Bridging the gap between computational and empirical approaches to
reference. Manuscript.
Jeanette Gundel was invited to
give an address at the second workshop on reference at the 2011 Cognitive
Science Meeting in Boson. A partial version 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-Cognitive Science 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).
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. Paper.
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. A revision was published as a book chapter in 2005
(see above).
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.
For the last several years, I have been
working with Juan
Sosa, Lorna Fadden, Sam
Al Khatib, Yasuko Sakurai, Emrah GšrgŸlŸ,
Morgan Mameni, Leticia
Rebollo Couto and her students at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, Noureddine Elouazizi, and Betty Leung on the meanings of prosody in
North American English and Latin American Spanish and Portuguese. We are interested in meanings associated
with different sentence types and constructions that are conveyed through
prosody. We have focused on prosodic
properties of questions: both yes-no questions and wh-questions, and more
recently on parenthetical verbs.
With regard to 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.
With regard to parenthetical verbs, we
are interested in how a speaker changes his/her epistemic commitment to the
material being presented midway through a sentence, e.g. ÒThe 9/11 terrorists
had fake driversÕ licenses from I believe FloridaÓ. What is the relationship
between the prosodic phrasing of the parenthetical and its semantic scope? Is
the scope constituent always focused?
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:
Daniel Chang, Yue Wang and
I have written an article on music and tone perception. It will soon be out.
Chang, Daniel, Nancy Hedberg, and Yue
Wang. Forthcoming. Effects of Musical and Linguistic Experience on Categorization of
Lexical and Melodic Tones. Journal of the Acoustic
Society of America.
Juan, Emrah and I have our yes-no questions paper published on-line now.
Soon to come out in print. This is a long paper that
describes much of the work we did under the support of the 2007-2012 SSHRC
Grant.
Hedberg Nancy, Juan M. Sosa and Emrah
GšrgŸlŸ. Forthcoming. The Meaning of Intonation in Yes-No Questions in American
English: A Corpus Study. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Published
on-line June 2014. Pre-publication version (pdf).
In July 2015, I co-organized a panel at
the International Pragmatics Association Meeting in Antwerp, Belgium on
prosodic constructions with Richard Ogden, Nigel Ward and Oliver Niebuhr. The
call for papers is here:
http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/pconstructions/.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2015. ÒLarger Prosodic Constructions
in DialogueÓ. Presentation accepted for panel on Prosodic Constructions,
International Pragmatics Association Conference, Antwerp, Belgium, July 26-31, 2015. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend
the conference due to a family emergency.
I was an invited speaker at the Workshop
on the Prosody and Meaning of (Non-)Canonical Question
Intonation Cross-Linguistically, which was at the meeting of the German
Linguistics Society (March 4-6, 2015) at the University of Leipzig. The workshop was organized by Daniel Wochner, Nicole DehŽ, Bettina
Braun, Beste Kamail, and Hubert Truckenbrodt. The Call for Papers is here.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2015. ÒNon-canonical Question Intonation in English.Ó
Invited talk for Workshop on the Prosody and Meaning of (Non-)Canonical
Question Intonation Across Languages.Ó The 37th Annual Meeting of
the Deutsche Gesellschaft fŸr Sprachwisssenschaft (DGIS), University of
Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, March 4-6, 2015. Slides.
Noureddine and I have a paper in a volume
on parenthetical verbs:
Hedberg, Nancy and Noureddine Elouazizi. 2015. Epistemic Parenthetical
Verb Phrases: C-Command, Semantic Scope and Prosodic Phrasing. In Schneider,
Stefan, Julie Glikman, and Mathieu Avanzi (eds.) Parenthetical Verbs.
Berlin/Munich/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 225-256. Pre-publication
version (pdf).
For the conference that gave rise to that
volume, I went to Paris in May 2012 to present a paper on how the prosody of
such phrases relates to their semantics.
Hedberg, Nancy and Noureddine Elouazizi. 2012. ÒEpistemic Parenthetical Verbs and Association with FocusÓ.
Presented at Parenthetical
Verbs: Hypotoxis, Parataxis or Parenthesis? UniversitŽ Ouest Nanterre,
Paris. May 23-25, 2012.
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).
Emrah GšrgŸlŸ, long time research
assistant on the questions project, finished his PhD in December 2012, with a dissertation
on the semantics of nouns in Turkish. He examined issues of number and the
count/mass distinction. In September 2013, he is beginning an Assistant
Professorship in the Department of English Language Teacher Education at Istanbul
Sabahattin Zaim University in Turkey.
On the subject of question intonation,
Juan and I went to India in November 2011 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. Paper.
I went to Montreal in September 2011 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 2011 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.