Location: UofSC’s University Conference Center (8th floor, Close-Hipp Buildings, 1705 College Street, Columbia, SC 29208)
AMPRA-5 Program (updated 11.5.22)
AMPRA Book of Abstracts
Keynote speakers
John W. Du Bois
University of California
Santa Barbara, USA
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Keynote abstract:
The Prosodic-Cognitive Workspace: Intonation Units and the Emerging Utterance
In naturally occurring conversation, the emerging utterance takes shape through the production of intonation units. The intonation unit may be informally defined as a spurt of speech uttered under a coherent intonation contour. As a fundamental unit of spoken and signed language, the intonation unit’s importance is two-fold:
- The intonation unit is universally recognizable by the prosodic cues that mark its boundaries, even in a language you’ve never heard before (Troiani & DuBois 2022);
- By hypothesis, the intonation unit represents a prosodic-cognitive workspace tied to working memory, whose affordances and limitations shape the development of the emerging utterance.
Different research traditions have identified different units as organizing one aspect or another of the speech production process. Three recognized key units are the utterance, turn, and intonation unit. Now, it is easy enough to see why we need utterances and turns – to package our messages and coordinate our interactions, respectively – but the function of the intonation unit is less clear. To address this question, we present an exploratory statistical analysis of the 67,000 manually transcribed intonation units in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois et al. 2000-2005). Taking words as proxies for linguistic function, we present heatmaps showing the distribution of a given word type over the time course of the intonation unit. We further present a clustering model based solely on intonation unit properties (the size of the intonation unit in words, and the position of a word relative to intonation unit boundaries). What emerges from the model is that some words/functions show a well-defined behavior in relation to the time course of the intonation unit, while others vary in less predictable ways. Interjections are the clearest part-of-speech-like category to emerge, suggesting that interjections show their deepest connections to prosody, but not to syntax. Among function words, certain other part-of-speech-like groupings emerge with reasonable clarity, including some connectives, discourse markers, and prepositions. In contrast, content words seem less likely to converge. Taken together, the results suggest that intonation units have a psychological reality closely tied to working memory insofar as it shapes the utterance production process, rather than to the conceptual content that shapes the internal phrasal structure of the message.
We conclude with a more speculative discussion of recent cross-disciplinary research that is suggestive of a possible evolutionary precursor of the intonation unit.
Elena Semino
Lancaster University
Lancaster, United Kingdom
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Keynote abstract:
Conflict in discussions of vaccinations on the parenting forum Mumsnet
Elena Semino (Lancaster) and the Quo VaDis team
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘vaccine hesitancy’ – ‘a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services’ – was identified by the World Health Organisations as one of the top 10 global health threats. Vaccine hesitancy is known to be linked to views and attitudes that are formed and negotiated in discourse, particularly online. However, online discussions of vaccinations can both reflect and reinforce polarised views about vaccinations, with little chance of understanding and empathy between people who hold different views.
This talk presents the findings of a corpus-based study of conflict in discussion of vaccinations on the parenting online forum Mumsnet. Mumsnet has 1.16bn page views a year, and is regarded as a straight-talking, robust platform for parenting discussions. Its most popular Talk Topic, ‘Am I being unreasonable?’ or AIBU, has been described as particularly combative. The study focused on references to ‘anti-vaxxers’ and the use of insults in threads about vaccinations on AIBU. It revealed multiple fronts of conflicts in discussions of vaccinations, and the potential for further entrenchment of views and attitudes as a result of those discussions.
Maite Taboada
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, Canada
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Keynote abstract:
Metaphors we hate by
Metaphors guide much of our daily lives and our language. You may say, with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, that we live by metaphor. We also hate by metaphor. Undoubtedly, we express hatred through literally hateful words. Nonetheless, many of the most subtle and insidious ways in which we convey hatred and abuse are metaphorical in nature. From the innocent ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer’ to the dehumanizing nature of much hate speech, metaphors play a fundamental role in how we convey negative opinion.
In this talk, I explore how various figures of speech, including metaphor, but also euphemism, litotes, hyperbole, and sarcasm convey abuse, toxicity, and hate, with a special focus on online discourse. Online discourse can be both shockingly and trivially toxic. Abuse and toxicity are particularly pernicious online, where the scale and speed of communication, coupled with the coded nature of the messaging, make content moderation challenging.
Research in recent years has led to proposals for automatic methods to identify toxicity and abuse, and even proposed automatic moderation of such online content. While automatic methods show promise as far as detecting the most overt expressions of abuse, they still miss the subtle and innovative ways in which online abuse is conveyed. I propose that many of the misses in automatic content moderation have to do with figurative language and metaphors. This talk will expand on these themes and present corpus examples of figurative language used to convey negative opinion, abuse, and toxicity.