UC Santa Cruz’s research magazine Inquiry published an article profiling the SPOT research program and team, titled “What it means, how…it sounds: Linking the linguistics puzzles of syntax and prosody.”
Read it at: https://inquiry.ucsc.edu/2019-20/what-it-means-how-it-sounds/
Junko Ito & Armin Mester, with some prosodic structures. Photo credit: UCSC Inquiry magazine.
A paper by Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda introducing the SPOT application and explaining the necessity for computational tools in the domain of syntax prosody investigations situated in Optimality Theory has appeared in the journal Linguistics Vanguard:
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2017-0051
Much recent work on the syntax-prosody interface has been based in Optimality Theory. The typical analysis explicitly considers only a small number of candidates that could reasonably be expected to be optimal under some ranking, often without an explicit definition of GEN. Manually generating all the possible candidates, however, is prohibitively time-consuming for most input structures – the Too Many Candidates Problem. Existing software for OT uses regular expressions for automated generation and evaluation of candidates. However, regular expressions are too low in the Chomsky Hierarchy of language types to represent trees of arbitrary size, which are needed for syntax-prosody work. This paper presents a new computational tool for research in this area: Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT). For a given input, SPOT generates all prosodic parses under certain assumptions about GEN, and evaluates them against all constraints in CON. This allows for in-depth comparison of the typological predictions made by different theories of GEN and CON at the syntax-prosody interface.
On May 4, 2019, the SPOT research group, in collaboration with The Humanities Institute, hosted a second workshop on Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory. The program and more photos are available at the link below.
SPOT2 Workshop participants
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz published an article on SPOT in December: “NSF Grant Supports Linguistics Research at UCSC through SPOT Project.”
Linguistics Professors Junko Ito and Armin Mester were recently awarded a multi-year NSF grant on Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (abbreviated as “SPOT”) that will propel work on the project through 2020.
Within the field of linguistics, syntax and prosody are well understood concepts, but for those of us outside the field, it takes some introduction. Simply put, syntax is sentence structure, and prosody is the sound structure of spoken language. Prosody — the stress, pitch, and grouping structure (pauses) we impose through speaking — gives audible form to the abstract syntactic structure, in a way that supplies the listener with crucial cues to the intended meaning of each utterance. […]
Read the whole article at https://thi.ucsc.edu/nsf-grant-supports-linguistics-research-ucsc-spot-project/?sf_paged=3.
The SPOT group gave multiple presentations at the 2018 Annual Meeting on Phonology, hosted by UC San Diego, October 5-7. 2018:
The first SPOT workshop was held on Nov. 18, 2017, at UC Santa Cruz. The program and abstracts are available through The Humanities Institute.
The grammatical structure of a sentence (syntax) influences the way it is pronounced (prosody), but prosody does not perfectly mirror syntax. Work on the syntax-prosody interface tries to model the range of mappings from syntax to prosody. Both the prosodic and the syntactic structure of a sentence can be fruitfully understood as tree structures, and so a short sentence can be parsed into many, many possible prosodic structures. In order to say which prosodic result is “best” (optimal according to a set of ranked constraints), as required by the widely used framework of Optimality Theory, every possible such tree must be considered and evaluated.
The SPOT application (implemented in JavaScript with an html GUI) is a tool for automatically generating and evaluating all possible prosodic parses of a string of words. Using SPOT enables the syntax-prosody analyst to be confident that they are not leaving out a crucial candidate that will break the analysis, and be sure that they haven’t made an addition mistake somewhere in counting up violations. SPOT is designed to be paired with OTWorkplace or other software for calculating ranking information and factorial typologies, in order to develop a complete and rigorous analysis.
Code available on Github [https://github.com/syntax-prosody-ot]
GUI accessible here: [https://people.ucsc.edu/~jbellik/spot/interface1.html]