• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-35
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• 2007

This paper attempts to investigate phonetic substances of the stress patterns of English compounds and noun phrases, showing that the theoretically derived stress structures are not consistent with the accentual patterns in real utterances. Even though it has been long claimed that compounds have the stress pattern [1 3] and that noun phrases, [2 1] as in Chomsky & Halle (1968), their difference has not been yet explored empirically or phonetically. I present a phonetic experiment conducted to see if there is any difference along the tonal contours, mostly focusing on their pitch accent distribution. 36 different compounds and 36 different noun phrases included in carrier sentences were examined, and they were varied in position within a sentence. Results showed that various accentual patterns were produced, and among them, [H* X] predominantly occurs in all three positions in both compounds and noun phrases, whereas the patterns [X H*] and [X X] appear relatively more frequently in final position than in initial and medial position. Furthermore, the pattern [Ac + No], in which the preceding element is pitch-accented with no accent on the following one, is the major stress pattern in both compounds and noun phrases and in all three sentence positions. This suggests that there seems to be no difference in accentual patterns between compounds and noun phrases, which is not consistent with the hypothesis. The results are interpreted as saying that the preceding element alone tends to be prominent with no accent following it both in compounds and noun phrases, and that therefore, theoretically speculated phonological claims are not always phonetically supported.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.95-109
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• 2004

Metrical Phonology has asserted that stress shift does not occur in English compounds because it violates the Continuous Column Constraint. Noun phrases, on the other hand, freely allow for stress shift, whereby the preceding stress moves forward to the preceding heavy syllable. This paper hypothesizes that stress does not shift in compounds as opposed to noun phrases and compares their pitch accentual patterns in a phonetic experiment. More specifically, we examined two-word combinations, noun phrases and compounds, whose boundaries involve stress clash and assured that the preceding words involve a heavy syllable ahead of the stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress. Depending on where the preceding pitch accent is aligned, stress shift is determined. Results show that stress shift occurs in approximately 47% of the noun phrases and 59% of the compounds; therefore, the hypothesis is not borne out. This suggests that the surface representations derived by phonological rules may not be implemented in real utterance but that phonetic forms may be determined by the phonetic constraints. directly operating on human speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.153-166
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• 2005

This paper attempts to examine the accent implementation and perception of noun phrases and compound nouns in English sentences, arguing that primary stress of noun phrase and compound noun is realized in relative prominence in intonation. The production test examines how the stress patterns of the noun phrases and compound nouns are realized in intonation of the English native speakers' utterances. The perception test investigates English and Korean listeners' comprehension of the intonation of the noun phrases and compound nouns. And the results of this experimental study show that speakers and listeners produce and perceive the primary stress as a relatively prominent accent even if in contrast of English listeners, Korean learners have difficulty in using the cue of pitch accent location and figuring out compound nouns and noun phrases.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.301-314
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• 2009

This study explores the function of the affixes -en and -ing that could influence the theta-roles of verbs to which the affixes are attached. The two affixes often appear in the synthetic compounds in English. The results are as follows. First, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed, which is proposed as Theta-linking Principle: that is, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed. Second, in the synthetic compounds including the affixes -en and -ing, the left element must not be the subject of the verb, which is the Synthetic Compound Constraint. And the affix -er link thematic roles of the sentential subject, such as Agent, Instrument. Thus, this study aims to find out the function of the affixes on the point of lexical functional approach.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.743-752
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• 2012

Semantic interpretation of the relationship between noun compound (NC) elements has been a challenging issue due to the lack of contextual information, the unbounded number of combinations, and the absence of a universally accepted system for the categorization. The current models require a huge corpus of data to extract contextual information, which limits their usage in many situations. In this paper, a new semantic relations interpreter for NCs based on novel lightweight binary features is proposed. Some of the binary features used are novel. In addition, the interpreter uses a new feature selection method. By developing these new features and techniques, the proposed method removes the need for any huge corpuses. Implementing this method using a modular and plugin-based framework, and by training it using the largest and the most current fine-grained data set, shows that the accuracy is better than that of previously reported upon methods that utilize large corpuses. This improvement in accuracy and the provision of superior efficiency is achieved not only by improving the old features with such techniques as semantic scattering and sense collocation, but also by using various novel features and classifier max entropy. That the accuracy of the max entropy classifier is higher compared to that of other classifiers, such as a support vector machine, a Na$\ddot{i}$ve Bayes, and a decision tree, is also shown.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2011

The present study reports the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation at word boundaries in Chinese-Korean interlanguage. Twelve Chinese learners of Korean and four Korean native speakers recorded obstruent#nasal sequences in noun compounds and verb phrases, and their different production patterns were examined in detail. While nasalization of the word-final obstruents occurred only in 11.7% of the obstruent#nasal sequences for the Chinese learners, the Korean native speakers showed complete nasalization of those sequences. However, there was small, but consistent effect of learning on the production of external sandhi in L2, because there were shown to be differences in the rate of nasalization between the two proficiency groups of Chinese participants. On average, the intermediate level learners nasalized the target stops at the rate of 16%, and the beginning level learners showed the 7% nasalization rate. In addition, it was found that the context difference such as noun compounds versus verb phrases does not influence the nasalization pattern across word boundaries.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.740-749
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• 2010

In a machine translation system, word sense disambiguation has an essential role in the proper translation of words when the target word can be translated differently depending on the context. Previous research on sense identification has mostly focused on adjacent words as context information. Therefore, in the case of nominal compounds, sense tagging of unit nouns mainly depended on other nouns surrounding the target word. In this paper, we present a practical method for the sense tagging of Korean unit nouns in a nominal compound. To overcome the weakness of traditional methods regarding the data sparseness problem, the proposed method adopts complement-predicate relation knowledge that was constructed for machine translation systems. Our method is based on a sentential form recovery technique, which recognizes grammatical relationships between unit nouns. This technique makes use of the characteristics of Korean predicative nouns. To show that our method is effective on text in general domains, the experiments were performed on a test set randomly extracted from article titles in various newspaper sections.