The Defining Schemes of Semantic Prosody

Sinclair is regarded as the father of semantic prosody study,however,the term "semantic prosody" was proposed by another famous linguist——Louw in 1993.From then on,several linguists proposed the definitions for this term and thus the features of semantic prosody become progressively clear.

A Contrastive Study of Semantic Prosody between English Native Speak ers and Chinese English Learners——Case Study of “Avoid”

In this paper,the author uses data-driven and contrastive interlanguage analysis approach,applying AntConc 3.2.1 as the tool,to make a comparison between corpus FLOB and CLEC on the using of the word "avoid".The result shows that the se mantic prosodic tendency between the two communities is in great similarities but also have differences.Through comparison and analysis,the author finds the hidden reason and summarizes how to improve.

A Corpus-based Approach to the Semantic Prosody of DOG

This paper is a corpus-driven study on the semantic prosody of DOG within English and Chinese culture through comparison of the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British(FLOB) and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese(LCMC).It examines the overall distributions and frequencies of DOG with positive,negative,and neutral prosodies.The results reveal the semantic prosody of DOG both in British culture and Chinese culture,as well as the differences between them.

A Case Study on Chinese Light Verbs “Nong” and “Gao” in Semantic Prosody

This study focuses on the semantic prosody of Chinese light verbs"Nong"and"Gao". Although both of them have thesame grammatical function as light verbs, they are distributed differently in contexts. The current study proposes that"Nong"and"Gao"are different in semantic prosody, in which the former tend to appear in negative constructions while the later denotes posi-tive meaning. This paper is going to contrast the their performances by corpus searching.

An Experimental Phonetic Study of Dialectal Impact on English Learners'Prosody--A Case Study of Shandong Dialect

It has been commonly recognized by the academic community that Chinese English learners can be regarded as the trilingual learners in dialects,Mandarin,and then English.Thus the first two acquired languages seem to be unavoidable to result in some effects on the study of English,especially the prosody of English.At the same time,the fact that the English prosodic research has been a significant project in the linguistic study with the globalization and localization of English,draws the public’s attention to the further study of the prosody of English for which is of vital importance in English learning.Focusing on the intonation,stress,tone,pause,and so on,prosody is the fundamental element of speech and the core of English phonetics.Taking Shandong dialect as an example,the study investigates the influence of the dialects on the learning of English prosody from two aspects—intonation and stress,by the acoustic analysis and comparison of the English prosody of linguistic data from Shandong EFL learners and English native speakers based on IViE(Intonational Variation in English)and ToBI(Tone and Breaks Indices)systems using Praat software.In addition,the reasons why these effects and problems take place are discussed profoundly.Therefore the corresponding measures should be taken in order to help students eliminate the negative impacts of their dialects and deliver standard English.The study may have great references on the improvement and elevation of teaching methods on the dialectal regions and some implications on second language acquisition.

The Respiratory Prosody of Seven-Syllable Modem-Style Poems Chanted in Cantonese

The paper focuses on the respiratory prosody of seven-syllable modem-style poems chanted in Cantonese, especially the relationship between respiratory prosody and sentential pause-extension. By collecting and analyzing respiratory and acoustic-phonetic signals simultaneously, this research reveals a two level chest and abdominal breath reset in the respiratory signals： （1） In the first level （L1）, the breath reset appears at the beginning or the end of the clause. （2） In the second level （L2）, the breath reset appears in the middle of the clause, of which the position relates to different tone patterns. There is a strong connection between respiratory prosody and the sentential pause-extension when chanting the seven-syllable modem-style poems in Cantonese： with L1 breath reset corresponding to the longest pause-extension at the end of the clause, while L2 breath reset corresponding to the longer pause-extension in the middle of the clause, usually falling at the end of the second syllable of the clause with tone pattern of Level-start and Level-end, or at the end of the fourth syllable of the clause with other tone patterns.

An Investigation of the Semantic Prosody of Synonyms--The Case of“Weichi(维持)”and“Baochi(保持)”in Chinese

In order to better apply the semantic prosody theory to distinguish synonyms,this article chooses to use analysis software and corpus to specifically compare and analyze the difference between“weichi(维持)”and“baochi(保持)”.Although both“weichi(维持)”and“baochi(保持)”show neutral colors in the dictionary,through analysis of collocation words,it is found that“baochi(保持)”is often matched with positively colored words,so it has positive semantic characteristics,while“weichi(维持)”is more neutral and negative semantic prosody characteristics,and in the diachronic and synchronic word frequency survey,the word frequency of“baochi(保持)”is higher than that of“weichi(维持)”.

Real Time Prosody Modification

Real time prosody modification involves changing the prosody parameters such as pitch, duration and intensity of speech in real time without affecting the intelligibility and naturalness. In this paper prosody modification is performed using instants of significant excitation (ISE) of the vocal tract system during production of speech. In the conventional prosody modification system the ISE are computed using group delay function, and it is computationally intensive task. In this paper, we propose computationally efficient methods to determine the ISE suitable for prosody modification in interactive (real time) applications. The overall computational time for the prosody modification by using the proposed method is compared with the conventional prosody modification method which uses the group delay function for computing the ISE.

A Contrastive Study of the Semantic Prosody of Degree Adverbs——The Case of“Ting(挺)”and“Guai(怪)”in Chinese

If the collocation of a word creates a semantic atmosphere in the context,it will infect the word,so that it has a certain semantic prosody.Based on corpus,this paper chooses ting(挺)and guai(怪)as a case study.This study combines description and interpretation,qualitative and quantitative analysis,and uses semantic prosody theory and related software technology to make a contrastive analysis of semantic prosody of degree adverbs ting(挺)and guai(怪)from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.We find that the semantic prosodies of ting(挺)and guai(怪)belong to positive prosody and negative prosody respectively,which are related to grammaticalization.

The Word Order and Prosody of Attributi

The syntactic category is where the phonetic rhythmic elements of speech come into play.In this paper,we analyze and describe the situation of the attributives with or without de(的),multiplicity,and expression,and consider that the change of order is related to the phonological factors.Chinese grammar is extremely flexible,and the rhythmic effect on the pragmatic plane is an important pursuit.

A Study of the Semantic Prosody of Adverb of Degree -The Case of “Très (Very)” in French

The collocations of lexical item are able to create a certain semantic atmosphere in the context,which will infect the lexical item and thus give it a certain semantic prosody.Based on the literature corpus,this paper takes the French degree adverb“très”as the object of study.Combining description and interpretation,qualitative and quantitative analysis,the research uses linguistic analysis software as well as semantic prosody theory to analyze its semantic prosody.The study found that“très”possesses mixed semantic prosody.

Literature Review on the Factors of Influence on the English Prosody Acquisition

Recent years, pronunciation of being native-like is more and more stressed in China; so many scholars have done researches on this area. Researchers explore disparate ways linked with prosody acquisition to try to look out the factors that give influence to the English prosody acquisition. Generally concluding, two aspects are taken into account by researchers: linguistics ways and sociolinguistics ways. For instances, the whole features of learning prosody acquisition, semantic ways to learn the prosody; input and output frequency, age and gender effect on the prosody are the important factors.

A Corpus-based Comparative Study of“get-passive”Semantic Prosody

Research on semantic prosody education is playing a vital role in the process of learning English.This research is based on the LOB corpus(Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus)and the IWriteBaby corpus,the core library of the IWrite Chinese English Learner Corpus.Using AntConc 3.5.7,to compare the semantic preference of the collocation words of get in the two corpora that meet the get-passive structure.Aiming to compare the semantic prosody differences between Chinese English learners and native speakers when they use the structure“get-passive”.It mainly focuses on the analysis of neutral collocation terms that have a higher frequency of co-occurrence with get and a mutual information value(I value)which is greater than or equal to 3.The research results show that Chinese English learners tend to have neutral semantic prosody when using this structure,while native speakers tend to prefer negative semantic prosody.With the combination of semantic prosody and corpus method should be attached importance to improve the level of English education.

Discourse Prosody Analysis of Donald Trump's Victory Speech Based on Appraisal Theory

Presidential victory speeches are intentionally employed to achieve certain communicative goals.Based on Appraisal Theory,this paper attempts to reveal evaluation features and to explore realizations and functions of prosodies in Trump’s victory speech.The research results prove that an appreciation of the functioning of discourse prosodies can better facilitate our understanding of the stances of writers or speakers.The present study contributes to specifying features of appraisal resources in presidential victory speeches and sheds light on the function of discourse prosodies.

Facial Expression Enhances Emotion Perception Compared to Vocal Prosody： Behavioral and fMRI Studies

Facial and vocal expressions are essential modalities mediating the perception of emotion and social communication. Nonetheless, currently little is known about how emotion perception and its neural substrates differ across facial expression and vocal prosody. To clarify this issue, functional MRI scans were acquired in Study 1, in which participants were asked to discriminate the valence of emotional expression （angry, happy or neutral） from facial, vocal, or bimodal stimuli. In Study 2, we used an affective priming task （unimodal materials as primers and bimodal materials as target） and participants were asked to rate the intensity, valence, and arousal of the targets. Study 1 showed higher accuracy and shorter response latencies in the facial than in the vocal modality for a happy expression. Whole-brain analysis showed enhanced activation during facial compared to vocal emotions in the inferior temporal-occipital regions. Region of interest analysis showed a higher percentage signal change for facial than for vocal anger in the superior temporal sulcus. Study 2 showed that facial relative to vocal priming of anger had a greater influence on perceived emotion for bimodal targets, irrespective of the target valence. These findings suggest that facial expression is associated with enhanced emotion perception compared to equivalent vocal prosodies.

OUTPUT PROSODY—HOW INFORMATION HIGHLIGHTS ARE PIGGYBACKED BY DISCOURSE STRUCTURE

Our previous research has shown that global paragraph or discourse prosody reflects overall between-and cross-phrase association.This paper presents evidence of how in order to reflect additional features of information structure and speakers’intention while maintaining discourse coherence,additional focal information is layered over global prosody in the form of focus or accent and perceived as prominence.Read and spontaneous Mandarin speech data were analyzed to illustrate(1)how focus or prominence,manually tagged as perceived emphasis causes differences in global tempo patterns,(2)how perceived emphasis is conditioned by discourse genre,(3)which rhythm,pitch and intensity features are presented in marking of emphasis at the local phrase level as well as at higher discourse levels,(4)how the acoustic patterns present in the emphasized portions of output speech could be better analyzed to reveal the existence and influence of discourse structure,(5)how prosodic highlighting is achieved through creation of acoustic contrasts between prominent units and the units in their immediate neighborhood.We argue that degree of contrast corresponds positively to information weighting and perceptual saliency.Results show that placement of prosodic highlights is systematic,and that discourse coherence is always maintained.Planning of discourse structure as well as information structure is systematic but highly flexible within a system in which information weighting is realized by means of features in discourse prosody.

A Comparative Study of the Usage of Synonyms Based on BNC-Taking Assessment and Evaluation as Examples

The discrimination of synonyms has always been one of the great challenges for English learners.Taking assessment and evaluation as examples,this study analyses the similarities and differences of the two words,as well as their usage from the perspectives of frequency,stylistics,collocation and semantic prosody with the help of British National Corpus,and demonstrates the importance of corpus retrieval tools in synonyms discrimination.Furthermore,this paper will give some suggestions for English learners and teachers in English vocabulary teaching.

A Corpus-based Investigation on News Attitudes towards the Belt and Road Initiative

Newspaper reports contain some attitudes in seemingly objective words. This corpus-based discourse analytical study,by comparing the use of semantic prosodies in the reports from China Daily and the Washington Post relating the Belt and Road Initiative, interprets the news attitudes presented by the two media toward it. The analysis of the news discourse will be carried out firstly with Antconc, a corpus analysis software which enables us to observe the most frequent co-occurrences of the phrases the Belt and Road, One Belt and One Road, New Silk Road and the initiative; and then COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) is involved to analyze the semantic prosodies of these co-occurrences, on this basis the semantic prosodies of the above phrases are revealed. The analysis of the semantic prosodies of the above four phrases in the two corpora shows that China Daily hold a supportive attitude toward the Initiative, while the Washington Post hold a complex one.

Design of Multilingual Speech Synthesis System

The main objective of this paper is to convert the written multilingual text into machine generated synthetic speech. This paper is proposed in order to provide a complete multilingual speech synthesizer for three languages Indian English, Tamil and Telugu. The main application of TTS system is that it will be helpful for blind and mute people that they could have the text read to them by computer. TTS system will help in retrieving the information from sites that contain information in different languages. It can be used in educational institutions for pronunciation teaching of different languages. We use concatenative speech syn-thesis where the segments of recorded speech are concatenated to produce the desired output. We apply prosody which makes the synthesized speech sound more like human speech. Smoothing is also done to smooth the transition between segments in order to produce continuous output. The Optimal Coupling algorithm is enhanced to improve the performance of speech synthesis system.

A Corpus-based Vocabulary Analysis of Near Synonyms:bring about and give rise to

Distinguishing the meanings of near synonyms always seems to be a challenging task for Chinese EFL learners,as is the case with bring about and give rise to be exemplified in the paper.I will use a corpus approach to unveil some implied semantic patterns and pragmatic features of the two phrases,and generalize their semantic prosodies as used by native English speakers by analyzing what kinds of nouns tend to co-occur with them,and also discuss whether there is a transfer of negative semantic prosody from the word cause to the two phrases under discussion.