WSFC

The Weighted SFC (WSFC) model is an extension to the SFC that can capture the prominence of each functional prototype contour in the final prosody [wsfc]. It does so through incorporating weighted contour generators (WCGs) in which weights are used to scale the prosodic contours based on their linguistic context, shown in Fig. 1 (all figures taken from [wsfc]). The WSFC has been shown to be able to successfully capture the impact of attitude and emphasis on prototype prominence.

Fig. 1 — Weighted contour generator introduced in the WSFC that features the SFC contour generator submodule (left) gated by the weighting module (right).

Modelling prominence

The WSFC has been shown to be able to successfully capture the impact of attitude and emphasis on prototype prominence. In Fig. 2 we can see that the syntactic function contours, while full-blown for the declaration (DC) attitude, are significantly diminished when dor the incredulous question (DI). In Fig. 3 we can see the effect of emphasis (word focus) on increasing the prominence of the tone function contours.

Fig. 2 — Decomposition of the melody of the French utterance “Les gamins coupaient des rondins.” with the WSFC for declaration (top) and incredulous question (bottom) into constituent functional contours: syntactical dependencies to the left and right (DG, DD), and clitics (XX). Activations of XX, DG and DD are strongly reduced when solicited in the DI context.

Fig. 3 — WSFC decomposition of the intonation of the Chinese utterance: “Yè Liàng hài pà Zhào Lì shuì jiào zuò mèng.”, into component contours: declaration (DC), tone contour 4 (C4), word boundary (WB), and emphasis (EM).