Kathryn Pruitt :: Research

My main research interests are the study of pitch and rhythm in natural language. I also like experimental approaches to answering linguistic questions. Links to some papers and things can be found below.

Some work on rhythm...
I am interested in natural language stress systems. A specific question I have explored lately is the implementation of metrical structure building in Harmonic Serialism, a generative model with iterative optimization.

Iterative foot optimization in rhythmic word stress.
2008. Paper presented at HUMDRUM 2008 at Rutgers University. [Handout]

Derivation and locality in stress.
2008. ms. [Link to paper coming soon]

Some work on pitch...
I'm also interested in intonation, particularly intonational meaning. Most recently I have been enamored with alternative questions, which present a lot of fun puzzles for the linguist, the semantic/pragmatic contribution of intonation among them. Below are three very similar presentations of the work I did on alternative questions for my first generals paper.

Perceptual relevance of prosodic features in non-wh-questions with disjuction.
2007. Paper presented at the UMass 2nd-year mini-conference. [Handout]

Mapping prosody to interpretation in alternative questions.
2008. Poster presented at the 21st CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. [Poster pdf | ppt]

Prosody and focus in alternative questions: accounting for interpretation.
2008. Poster presented at Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody, Cornell Univerisy, Ithaca, NY. [Poster pdf | ppt].

This work on the role of the pitch fall in alternative questions has led to some other work (in progress) that tries to integrate this observation with some of the more stubborn facts about alternative questions. (Feel free to email me if you're interested in hearing about it. Hopefully something interesting from this work will show up on this page eventually.)

Last updated 9-Oct-2008.