The Rhythm Of Syntactic Ambiguity Acoustic Performance

This paper investigates from the speaker’s point of view the role of the prosodicfeatures in disambiguating four kinds of syntactic ambiguities, using the methods ofexperimental phonetics. The research objects include verb-object/modification structureambiguity, coordinate/modification structure ambiguity and modification, andsubject-predicate level segmentation ambiguity. The author selects from all the availableliterature lots of syntactically ambiguous phrases of each type, places them in differentcontexts, and asks four native speakers of Chinese to naturally read them. Research theprosodic features of the ambiguous phrases in different contexts one by one, and try toexplain it with phonetic theory.This study found:1. The relative relationship of syllables-duration within ambiguousphrase was affected by many factors, for example: the number of syllable, phoneme’number of syllable, the position of a phrase in the sentence and tones etc. These factorsdetermine the relative duration of the syllables within a particular ambiguous phrase,which hardly changes even when the speaker takes duration as a means of disambiguation.2. There are different performances of duration under different meanings inverb-object/modification structure ambiguity. But this performance is only a tendency.Pitch plays a big/prominent part in resolving such ambiguity. Main means are expandingthe pitch range and raising the pitch. By contrast, the prosodic feature is more effective indisambiguating coordinate/modification structure ambiguity than the verb-object structureambiguity. But different speakers did not show a consistent target point.3. The speaker candisambiguate the level segmentation ambiguity effectively using the prosodic features.There are three kinds of disambiguation strategies: the first one is extending the duration ofthe one or two syllables before a syntax boundary and setting a pitch reset at that boundary;the second one, extending the duration or raising the pitch of some grammatically stressedsyllables; the last one, the speaker emphasizes the semantic focus according to their ownunderstanding.