No prosody-syntax trade-offs: Prosody marks focus in Mandarin cleft constructions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In line with the idea that language has evolved to be efficient and to avoid redundancy, syntactic means of marking information structure have been derived from prosodic ones, and vice versa, for many languages. On the basis of crosslinguistic comparisons, prosody-syntax trade-offs have frequently been described for clefts. The present study investigated whether such trade-offs can also be observed language-internally, testing whether clefting reduced prosodic focus marking in production or its effects on perception in Mandarin. A production study found that clefts showed prosodic focus marking equal to or exceeding that found in syntactically unmarked equivalents. In both syntactic conditions, focused constituents had larger f0 ranges, higher f0 maxima and longer durations compared to a broad focus baseline, while post-focal constituents showed lower f0 maxima and minima, lower intensity and, for clefts, shorter durations (28 participants, 937 utterances containing 4466 syllables analyzed in total). A rating study likewise found that the effect of prosody on the perception of information structure was not modulated by clefting, which neither affected ratings nor reaction times (102 participants, 2448 responses analyzed in total). These findings suggest that prosody is integral for marking focus in cleft constructions instead of constituting a redundant cue.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it