Stress Distribution of Given Information in Chinese Reading Texts

Yuan Jia and Xiaoxiao Ma

Abstract:

Using an information structure annotation System, namely RefLex Scheme, the present study annotates the information structure of Chinese reading discourse and explores the relationship between information status and stress distribution. Our analysis results show that given information could bear stresses as well as new information. Specifically, the stress distribution of given information is significantly affected by the sub-category of information status on the referential level, i.e., r-given, while r-given-generic and r-given-displaced show different stress distributions. However, the sub-category of information status on the lexical level exhibits no such effect. Besides, the given information of proper nouns and personal pronouns on the lexical level can attract stresses. The reason is that a proper noun often serves as the topic of a sentence and a personal pronoun usually processes a center shift. Furthermore, the inconsistency of information status on both referential and lexical levels causes the stress on the given information unit.

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Cite as: Jia, Y., Ma, X. (2018) Stress Distribution of Given Information in Chinese Reading Texts. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 2171-2175, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1602.

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BiBTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{Jia2018,
author={Yuan Jia and Xiaoxiao Ma},
title={Stress Distribution of Given Information in Chinese Reading Texts},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={2171--2175},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1602},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1602} }