ISSUES
REGARDING UTTERANCE STRESS ASSIGNMENT
(
INTRODUCTION.
Nobody likes to read introductions
and yet they feel obliged to do so, so as not to miss something of importance. I
will therefore limit myself to a few words which I feel to be VERY important in
that they will make this dissertation easier for the reader to
understand.
Before I began to study the
subject matter that would enable me to write this dissertation, I had little
previous knowledge on
Therefore, I began this
dissertation not in the position of having already studied in the field for a
number of years but as a relative newcomer and this is reflected in the form of
the dissertation.
The idea was not to produce
some extremely technical piece of work but to gain a sound understanding of the
issues involved in
The first part of the
dissertation is more general in nature and could be followed by someone with a
minimun of linguistic training. It is in this section
that I air for the mostpart my own views as they
developed during the writing of the dissertation.
The second part of the
dissertation is much more theoretical in nature and begins by reproducing some
of the more pertinent arguments as to why
Clearly then, this
dissertation handles more than one single idea or observation regarding
SENTENCE
V UTTERANCE STRESS
Before entering into the main body of
this dissertation, a few words must be said regarding the difference(s) between
sentential and utterance stress.
My initial ideas having read a number of
papers was that sentential stress was a purely theoretical construct not capable
of being proved (or perhaps more importantly disproved) since it is never given
physical realization:the case being that the moment
the sentence is said, it is no longer a sentence but an
utterance.
Sentential stress did allow one to speak
of "the null context", but such a concept isn't ruled out by adopting utterance
stress either. Even in an utterance, everything can be
new.
The idea of sentence stress also
allows linguists to talk of "default accenting" and "focus accenting" from a
different angle. It is inherent in the very idea of default accent, for example,
that it does not go on the same item as a sentence accent would.
Ladd seems to be of this
persuasion although he doesn't explicitly say as much. See section on Deaccenting and Default Accent for example.
However, to even talk of an
abstract entity being stressed was questionable for me at first and it was only
quite late in the day that Noel Burton Roberts pointed out to me that since word
stress was stored in the abstract representation, so too could sentence stress
be.
Utterance stress on the other hand
looked a far more interesting and useful project. Different theories could be
empirically tested and disproved and the context could be investigated so as to
tell us why a speaker chose to stress one word rather than
another.
Therefore, I have chosen to pursue a
topic that is utterance orientated as suggested by the title of this
dissertation.
Until recently, I would have said
that no mariage was theoretically possible between
models of sentence and utterance stress because of their very nature: abstract v
contextual. However, I have now seen an attempt to link them within the same
theory and I look forward to reading this paper in its final form. But for the
time being, I have assumed that the situation is as I have said above. Utterance
stress is an altogether more interesting topic to study.
PART
1
SEMANTIC
V SYNTACTIC THEORIES OF UTTERANCE STRESS ASSIGNMENT
(
Chomsky and
Indeed, at first glance, Bresnan's work looked promising since it apparently
correctly explained well known exceptions to the Chomsky and Halle NSR, such as
1) Helen left DIRECTIONS for
George to follow.
2) Helen left directions for
George to FOLLOW.
Bresnan
maintained that in 1), "directions" is the underlying direct object of "follow"
and therefore receives stress in the lower cycle with stress on "George" and
"follow" consequently being reduced.
When "directions is raised, it is then the only contender for primary
stress since the other potential contenders for primary stress have already been
reduced.
In 2), "directions" is quite
simply not the direct object of "follow", and hence it is "follow" as the
rightmost content word in the deep structure that receives primary stress in the
first cycle and maintains it throughout the derivation.
However, Bolinger soon pointed out that Bresnan had been misled by the commonplace and that
counter-examples did exist.
3) I have passages to
MEMORIZE
4) I can't finish in an hour.
There are simply too many
topics to ELUCIDATE.
5) I need a light to READ
by.
On the basis of such examples,
Bolinger favoured a semantic theory of
"The Chomsky-Halle Nuclear Stress Rule and its modifications by Bresnan, and to some extent the criticisms that have been
levelled at it, have in common an attempt to account for accent in terms of
syntax. Instead, accent should be viewed as independent, directly reflecting the
speakers intent and only indirectly the syntax.
Accented words are points of information focus.(Bolinger 633:01)
But Bolinger is able to dispense with syntax so readily because
of the nature of his work. For the most part, he merely collects
"counter-examples" to syntactic theories and uses them as evidence for a
Semantic theory of
The advocates of Syntactic USA
rules seem to me to wrongly beleive that to say that
stress is placed on for instance Subject NP's or verbs rather than prepositions
or pronouns is to give a reason. This is clearly not so. All it is is an observation. Since we can find no physiological reason
why this is so, we must look elsewhere for explanations. This is what Bolinger was doing when he remarked
"Bresnan
1971 carries the syntactic argument one step
further by excepting pronouns as such from items that
carry "primary stress". A semantic theory accounts for
this by saying that pronouns are formal deictic elements
that are semantically empty. (Bolinger 636:24)
In the following discussion, it
will soon become apparent that I am not using the word "semantics" in its
narrower linguistic sense of "truth conditional" or even in its everyday sense
of "meaning in general". I have often used the word "psychological" instead of
"semantics" and this should be taken as an indication by the reader as to how a
semantic theory of
I believe that an understanding of
the relationship between syntax and semantics in relation to
The difference between semantic and syntactic theories of the
Therefore, Subject Noun Phrases,
Pronouns, Prepositions etc can all be differentiated
both syntactically and psychologically. But with regards to the question in hand
of
There are a number of reasons.
Cross linguistically, stress (and other related phenomena such
as intonation and tones) do seem prone to indicate different semantic
meanings.
Within English, there is a large
amount of apparently systematic alternation of stress patterns, and this
intuitively has some sort of semantic correlate.
This is not to say that all
alternations have semantic corollaries. We could look at the alternations in
pronunciation of the word "economics" or the more fluid German word order where
there is apparently no difference in the semantics. Each case must be taken on
its merits.
Where there is no alternation such
as in the position of prepositions in English (or very little anyway since in
the SS, we do find abandoned prepositions word finally although without apparent
semantic import), it is easier to describe the rule syntactically. However, even
in such cases, if we were to insist on an explanation as to why prepositions in
English nearly always precede the noun, we would have to retreat to
psychological reasons such as the facilitation of the processing of information
with fixed word order. In the final analysis, syntactic explanations alone will
never give us access to the deeper motivations behind human speech patterns;
only the tools for describing a situation that exists.
So when linguists argue
whether the lack of stress on sentence final pronouns is due to the syntax or
the semantics, the debate is largely pointless. All words can be referred to
both syntactically and semantically and therefore incorporated into syntactic
and semantic theories. But for the reasons alluded to above, I believe that with
regards to
"Our definition of neutral accent
placement is based on the SEMANTICS of focus. Bolinger's formulation must be changed from "accent goes on
the point of information focus" to "accent goes on the point of information
focus, unless the focus is unmarked, in which case the accent goes in a location
determined by the syntax". But focus remains a semantic phenomenon." (Ladd
104:12)
However, I would like to modify
his one but last sentence to "... in which case the accent goes in a location
most easily described syntactically".
NORMAL
STRESS AND POSSIBLE SYNONYMS
Whether we advocate a syntactic or
semantic theory of
Since I favour a semantic theory
of
"
However, such a definition is
problematic since even if we take the simplest of sentences, write it down, and
ask someone to read it, the reader is known to assign a context to that sentence
and there is ample evidence that the assignment of context to the sentence
depends largely on the readers individual beliefs and
presuppositions. Gussenhoven demonstrates this and
comes to the conclusion
"What this means is that the
concept of normal stress
cannot reasonably be a part of a linguistic theory
of
Accent Assignment as it
necessarily involves a prior
interpretation of semantic material as either background
or
variable (-focus or + focus ) (Gussenhoven 387:10)
Another possible way out is to say
that
"Normal stress is that stress
pattern assigned to a sentence (which simultaneously becomes an utterance) which
we assume holds entirely new information for us. i.e.
all + focus".
But Gussenhoven points out the inadequacies of such an
approach.
"Many sentences are excluded from
having a full focus
interpretation because their semantic material is too
obviously part of the background. Also, sentences
that
include a focus governor cannot be given a full
(+ focus) interpretation
either". (Gussenhoven 388:07)
Therefore, the question we will ask here
is whether there are any viable alternatives left defining "normal
stress".
Whether linguists expound a syntactic or
a semantic theory of
Now, in phonology, no one would dispute
that a speaker is quite capable of making a mistake e.g.
"I need to gno [ ]
the answer"
instead of
"I need to know the
answer"
Drawing a parallel, let us imagine that
certain rules for the
Was it an ex-convict with a red
shirt that he was warned
to look
out FOR. (Cleft sentences are remarked on later).
If normal stress is somehow to be taken
as synonymous with "grammatically correct" stress as defined by the rules, then
it does exist. Examples as those above are hard to create since our imagination
is such that we can create contexts that do accommodate what at first appears as
totally unacceptable
Therefore, another possible
definition of normal stress might be
“
Hence, the second line in the
dialogue below would appear deviant as per our new definition of normal
stress.
"Do you have six?"
"No, I HAVE ten".
Therefore, if normal stress is
taken instead as "context and presuppositionally"
correct stress, it most certainly exists and examples proving this are easier to
come by than those that show the existence of "grammatically" correct
stress.
But all this might seem a rather
trivial point. If any rules for
Does the postulation of
normal stress or some such similar notion allow us to gain anything
else?
Ladd seems to think
that this is the case. Speaking of a sentence which other linguists call
"contrastive", Ladd wishes to deny that the concept of contrastive stress is
valid but yet wants to maintain that certain stress patterns intuitively are
marked in some way.
"Yet it is also obvious that there
is something special
about this accent placement which underlies
everyone’s
intuitions that it is different from "normal stress"
(Ladd
102:01)
The point is that one cannot talk
of contrastive stress or any other sort of "special" stress without
automatically implying a non-contrastive or non-special stress.
Ladd certainly needs some
concept of normal stress, otherwise he will not be able to talk about his
special cases of "deaccenting and default accent" and
"narrow focus".
Perhaps the problem lies in the
very word "normal". To some, it might suggest statistical prevalence. But it is
dubious whether the majority of sentences are in fact uttered with normal stress
if "normal" is to be interpreted statistically. Worse still, the concept of
normal suggests that any deviance from normal stress is "abnormal" (the everyday
antonym of normal). However, we clearly do not want to suggest that a speaker
who does not utter a sentence with normal stress is in some way
abnormal.
Ladd chose the label "Neutral
Accent Placement" for a situation that other linguists might call "normal
stress" and summarizes this as follows.
"If the focus constituent is the
whole sentence, the
accent may be said to be neutral and the focus
unmarked.
This case corresponds to
"normal stress" in traditional
descriptions,...." (Ladd 129:7)
"Neutral Accent Placement" does
seem a better title. The placement of the stress on the rightmost content word
allows the sentence to be compatible with the greatest number of possible
contexts (as is shown later with the sentence "Did Maxwell kill the judge with a
hammer"). Yet, of the various contexts with which the sentence is felt to be
compatible, one context does not stand out as being more likely than the others
as long as we only consider the stress and not the presence of proper nouns etc
and the actual context in
which
the sentence was uttered. Neutral Stress Placement truly is neutral with regards
to context.
And of course the earlier undesirable
connotations with statistics and/or abnormality are lost.
Further points should be made.
Sometimes, Ladd speaks of "broad focus"(Ladd 104:21) instead of "Neutral Accent
Placement". This is because it allows a "broad" interpretation" i.e. the
greatest number of possible contexts with which it is compatible. The antonym of
"broad" is "narrow" and when a sentence is uttered with non-neutral accent
placement it does indeed display something that could be described as "narrow
focus". Sentences uttered with "narrow focus" always have a narrower range of
possible contexts with which they could be compatible.
DEACCENTING
AND DEFAULT ACCENT.
In this section, I would like to take up
another issue debated by Ladd in his chapter titled "Deaccenting and Default Accent" (Ladd
104).
"To my knowledge, only Bolinger and Schmerling come
close
to
formulating a corollary of deaccenting, which is that
in
order for an item to be perceived as deaccented, the
accent must fall elsewhere, and it is thus possible for
a
word to be accented as it were by default".(Ladd
105:25)
So that we have something to work
with, let us look at one of his examples (Ladd 104:29)
A) Has John read
Slaughterhouse-FIVE?
B) No, John doesn't READ
books.
He remarks of this
example
"...we can say that the accent is
on "read" merely to
deaccent "books". This is not a focus accent but
a
default accent. We are not focusing on read;
the
positive, marked aspect of the accentual pattern is not
that "read" is accented, but that "books"
is
deaccented".(Ladd 105:29)
Let us reflect on both "deaccenting" and "default" accent in
turn.
Deaccenting can only take place if we are prepared to admit
that another word carried the accent but "lost" it so to speak. However, there
is never any evidence for such an event in English to my knowledge and such a
theory is therefore unfalsifiable and consequently
uninteresting. Those who favour it probably would make reference to "sentence
stress" and "utterance stress" as two separate phenomena and where there is a
supposed
difference, they would attribute it to the deaccenting of a word in the sentence and the appearance of
stress elsewhere in the utterance.
Default accent by contrast is
always an utterance phenomenon since it implies that the context causes deaccenting of a word and that the accent is then placed
elsewhere by default. It is this idea that I wish to challenge. To do so, I will
assume that deaccenting does exist but this is
theoretically questionable since one could object to an accent (a physical
thing) which is context sensitive being assigned to a sentence (an abstract
thing) which is removed of all context.
If "books" is deaccented for the sorts of reasons normally forwarded by
linguists e.g. repeated information, predictable, presupposed, given etc, then
surely "read" should be deaccented for the same
reasons. Indeed more so since the verb "to read" appears in the question
(although in a different tense), while "books" has to be inferred from the
question as the superordinate of the hyponym
"Slaughterhouse-Five".
The idea that a speaker deaccents a word for a certain reason(s) only to then place
a default accent on another word which should be deaccented for the same reason(s) is intuitively
weak.
But it must be said that sentence
B) doesn't sound unnatural in this discourse and so its accenting remains to be
explained.
The answer I believe is that
"read" IS a focus accent and focuses on the constituent "doesn't read" while
deaccenting "books" which is given/presupposed. (How stress on a word allows certain
phrases to be interpreted as in focus is explained later but for now, the reader
should intuitively feel that this is possible).
The astute reader might then ask
why B) doesn't then place the accent directly on "doesn't" since "read" is also
given or presupposed. Briefly, there seems to be a rule in English that doesn't
allow a negative to be stressed except when making a counter-assertion c.f. the
example above with
A) I know that John reads
books.
B) That's not true. John DOESN'T read
books.
Furthermore, such a theory leads to a
certain amount of ambiguity as Ladd himself noticed. Of the
sentence
"Harry wants a VW, but his
girlfriend would prefer an
AMERICAN car" (Ladd 109:10)
he
says that it seems reasonable to talk of a focus on American but
that
"...this will not explain the
deaccenting of "car". (Ladd
109:15).
Quite clearly though, "car" is
given or presupposed in some way by virtue of "VW" while "American" isn't and
this observation is enough to explain away the example without recourse to a
default accent (whether you admit to deaccenting or
not in principle). Of another sentence
"Harry wants a Buick, but his
girlfriend can’t STAND
American
cars". (Ladd 109:13)
Ladd
suggests that we cannot say if "stand" is accented because it is the speakers
wish to focus on this constituent (focus accent) or because "American" and
"cars" are deaccented (default accent).
I however, feel that such
utterances are explainable solely with the concept of a focus accent. "Stand" is
focused on because it opposes "wants" while "American" and "Car" are in some way
given or presupposed and therefore poor contenders for stress.
Ladd’s confusion led him to make a
rather strange remark.
"But armed with the concept of default accent, it is
not
hard to demonstrate with evidence from dialogue that the
phenomenon of deaccenting includes
both occurrence after
the
sentence accent - which gives the impression of
greatly reduced "stress"- and occurrence before it-
which
does not".(Ladd 107:27)
But how can this be so? Either an item
is perceived as deaccented or not; or are we to allow
various degrees of deaccenting?
What Ladd has actually said if I
may rephrase his words above, is that if the accent is moved to the right, the
deaccented word is heard as less deaccented than if the accent is moved to the left. Why
might this be?
The answer fits in well with my
earlier remarks on focus and constituents. If the accent is moved to the right,
the original word that would have had the accent in the null context may
still be in focus while this is not the case if the accent goes
leftwards.
His conception of the utterance
and its stress is really one of refocusing (broad and narrow focus) and not
default accent. This explains why he perceives a difference between what he
believes to be a default accent appearing to the left and right of the deaccented word. If default accent was truly disparate of
focus, then it wouldn't matter where the default accent should occur. This
however is clearly not the case.
Finally, we should ask whether
there is any similarities between the mechanisms that focus on a certain
constituent and those that choose to deaccent a
word.
As said before, it is not here
that we will try to define
the
exact mechanisms but Ladd did allude to a list of possible reasons for deaccenting such as "repeated", "presupposed", "given",
"predictable" etc.
What then might be the reasons for
focusing on a constituent? The reasons are the antonyms of the above terms i.e.
"new", "unpredictable" etc. Clearly, there is a relationship here which can be
expressed without recourse to two separate types of stress (focus and
default).
Therefore, I conclude here that
there is no work for Ladd’s default accent and that the idea of focus accent
suffices. Cf.
"From this, we can conclude that
there are two
fundamentally different types of non-neutral
accent
placement - narrow focus accent and default
accent."
(Ladd
106:24)
DEGREES
OF ACCENTABILITY
My remarks in this section will be
surprisingly short considering the amount of debate that this question has
caused. This is because the groundwork has already been covered in previous
sections, especially "Semantic v Syntactic Theories of USA".
There, I argued that words or
phrases could be referred to semantically or syntactically and supporters of
both semantic and syntactic theories of
Briefly reiterating what was said
before, we must firstly note that there is a lot of alternation in English as to
whether the NP or VP is stressed and it apparently has repercussions on the
meaning. Therefore, if we are to seek explanations, and not just make
observations, we would do better to look towards the semantics
(psycholinguistics) and not the syntax. But this still leaves the hierarchy
question unanswered.
Schmerling
(1972) believes that NP's do have a tendency to be stressed in preference to
VP's.(although she believes the motivation to be
syntactic.) She bases her argument on such examples as
The KETTLE'S
boiling
The ICE has
melted
My KEYS have disappeared
The PROFESSOR rang
The CHIMNEY-POT'S fallen
off
The BRAKES
failed
However, Allerton and Cruttenden didn't
agree with her
"The syntactic structure has a
part to play if only
a
subsidiary one:it specifies the subject and the
verb
as
candidates for the main accent and in the unmarked
case the main accent will come on the verb as the
right-
most constituent (Allerton and
Cruttenden 153:05)
Cruttenden, by not apparently having the kind of
understanding that I have outlined above between syntax and semantics, finds
himself wanting the best of both worlds.
"It may, as Bolinger suggests, be true that ultimately
nucleus placement comes down to speaker choice, but
there are too many regular correlations with syntax to
say
that it is totally irrelevant".(Cruttenden
86:31)
Ladd for his part believes that nouns do
attract stress rather than verbs.
"This suggests not a dichotomy
between content words and
function words, but rather a HEIRARCHY of accentability,
where content words are more accentable than function
words-this is surely uncontroversial-and where nouns are
more accentable than other content
words. (Ladd 116:09)
One of the problems for the uninitiated
is that such statements presuppose that we can recognize the stressed item and
the only task is to give a rule that forecasts/explains the sentential stress.
But are we presupposing to much?
"We noted that there is no
one-to-one relation between acoustics and perception." (Cruttenden 5:28).
Such a statement is not reflected in the
examples throughout the literature which mark sentences (the sources of which
are often left unrevealed) as having this or that
It
may well be that certain sentences said in certain contexts do not have a
clearly definable stress pattern. Why then, have linguists been deceived into
thinking that they have?
"In particular, different types of
segment directly
influence the acoustics of a prosodic feature and such
segmental effects have to be discounted by
listeners
interpreting the meaning of a longer
prosodic
pattern.(Crutenden
I fail to see why Cruttenden limits this statement to "longer prosodic
features". It may be that short intransitive sentences as listed above hold
their own pitfalls. Indeed, I can envisage certain problems for the speaker when
uttering a short utterance rather than a long one.
In uttering a long sentence with
INTENDED
MISINTERPRETED AS
PRE-NUCLEAR
LOW + HIGH
RISE
PRE-NUCLEAR
LOW + HIGH FALL
RISE FALL
PRE-NUCLEAR
MID + LOW RISE
FALL RISE
PRE-NUCLEAR
MID + RISE FALL
FALL RISE FALL
The emerging idea should be clear
although I would rather not make claims that such patterns do exist. Some of
them must however and many more combinations are possible. And the above
represents just one possible point of confusion in the interpretation of
intransitive sentences. I have yet to see any argument proving that all
sentences must have a primary stress.
In view of such considerations as
above, it may not be surprising that a small residue of problems is left
unsolved. While we cannot give a definitive definition of what constitutes
stress, it seems ambitious to expect to always be able to recognize it.
REASONS
FOR FOCUSING.
In a
earlier section "Deaccenting and Default Accent", we
briefly mentioned some of the possible motivations for the placement of focus
accent although we never reached any conclusions.
In this section, we will examine
the question more closely, using a paper by E.F.Prince
as our guiding light since she sets out the issue quite clearly and discusses a
number of difficulties with various proposals.
Princes
article assumes that focus assignment has something to do with the "given/new"
dichotomy. She offers three, more precise possible
definitions of exactly how "given" and "new" can be defined and argues for the
inherent superordinacy of one of the definitions over
the others. As well as adding some of my own remarks and examples to the
conversation, I have introduced a fourth possible definition of "given" and
"new" which I felt should be treated since it is often cited in the litterature as a possibility.
Given
as Predictability and Recoverability.
Prince begins by saying that in
speaker/hearer terms, this idea may be worded
as
"The speaker assumes that the
hearer CAN PREDICT OR COULD
HAVE PREDICTED that a
PARTICULAR LINGUISTIC ITEM will
or
would occur in a particular position WITHIN A
SENTENCE" (Prince
226:04).
This idea seems to have come
from some of Halliday’s earliest work where he makes
no great distinction between the two words, treating them as two sides of the
same coin.
However,
I find it more correct to treat the two phenomena separately although they are
interrelated.
I shall interpret "predictability"
in the sense of "clairvoyancy" and "recoverability" as
"the replacement of elliptic items". Of the latter, we cant say very much since elliptic items cannot be stressed.
However, ellipsis is used as a test for deciding whether an item is predictable
and latter on I hope to convince the reader that this is theoretically wrong.
But first, we shall examine predictability.
By defining "predictability" in the
sense of "clairvoyancy" pure and simple, I am trying
to rule out examples of anaphoric and cataphoric
reference. The basic difference between predictability and reference is that the
former is not dictated while the latter is. That is to say that where
predictability is concerned, you may predict item x but item y could have occured whereas with recoverability and ellipsis item x must
occur c.f.
I saw Robert leave as
opposed to arrive, laugh etc
Robert and Brian left Robert left (and no
other inter
pretation is poss)
Of
course, predictability must nevertheless be based on past discourse otherwise it
becomes impossible to predict almost anything, but the difference between the
terms should now be clear.
However, the problem with
"predictability" is that
due
to the linear nature of utterances, such a model can only really concern itself with items
appearing to the right in a phrase
or clause. This is because it is normally impossible to predict how a
speaker will begin a phrase/clause but once he has embarked on it, we may be
able to make strong predictions as to how the speaker will terminate it. Brown
and Yule speak of "Top Down Processing" with regards to
the relationship between sentences (Brown and Yule 234) but the concept can also
be applied intersententially.
Hence we would expect that any
Another weakness of predictability
a la clairvoyancy is its apparent inability to explain
such sentences as
Your TROUSERS are on
fire
where
the state of being on fire is rather unusual with regards to trousers and
therefore may be said to be unpredictable.
Let us now look at recoverability
(and ellipsis). The idea here seems to be that although ellipted items can never be stressed, they can be used as a
test for seeing if an item is given.
Since ellipsis is normally
anaphoric or cataphoric, the ellipted item must occur in the discourse or text. In this
sense then, it is given. Conversely, the idea is that if an item cannot be
elliptic, it cannot be "given"
Prince
quickly shows how such a test leads to incredibly strange results. In both
sentences (Prince 226) immediately below, "John" appears and is therefore given
in some sense
a) Mary paid John and he bought himself a
new coat.
b) John paid Mary and he bought himself a
new coat.
However,
only in sentence b1) can John be elliptic
a1) *Mary paid John and bought
himself a new coat
b1) John paid Mary and bought himself a new
coat.
Since
ellipsis is a test for giveness, Prince asks if we are
to conclude that John is given in b) but not in a), since only sentence b1)
allows ellipsis.
The problem is that the
constraints on ellipsis are syntactic and not dictated by anything to do with
the given/new dichotomy. By definition, anaphoric and cataphoric reference seeks out items actually occurring in
the discourse and in this sense such words are always
given.
A possible attempt to save the
recoverability test is to say that sentence a1) does have a change of subject in
the two clauses and it is this change which is
unpredictable.
However,
sentences such as the one below do not display any such change. "An account" is
object in both clauses and yet ellipsis is blocked.
c) *I'll open an account if you'll
open
Here,
the reason can only be syntactic.
Given
as saliency
Expanding
on her first tentative proposal and its inherent weaknesses, E.F.Prince proposes a second possible definition of
given.
"The speaker assumes that the
hearer has or could appropriately have some particular thing/entity/...in
his/her CONSCIOUSNESS at the time of hearing the utterance". (Prince 228:30) The
question now is how exactly an item can be deemed to be in the consciousness of
the hearer at a certain moment. In
its most simplistic form, one could simply check back through the preceding
discourse to see if a certain item has already appeared. If it has, it is
"given". H.A.Halliday adopts this view with regards to certain grammatical
processes.
"In
any information unit that is non-initial in a discourse, recoverable information
tends to be represented anaphorically, by reference,
substitution or ellipsis. Ellipsis involves systematic features having no realisation in
structure and therefore having no potentiality of association with information
focus: what is unsaid cannot than
otherwise be taken for granted. By <reference> is meant here the anaphoric use of what are
essentially items of extralinguistic, situational
reference such as pronominals and demonstratives, as
in does John rent this house?-no, he's bought it. Substitution involves those
items that are essentially text-referring like one and do: Has anyone seen
the play?- I think John has done.
From the point of view of information structure WH- items are reference
items when interrogative and substitutes when relative." (Halliday (Journal of Linguistics 1967-68
206.)
Since
we are now working with a definition that demands that a “given" item is assumed
to be in the CONSCIOUSNESS of the hearer by the speaker, it is important to ask
"How long does givenness last?"(Chafe 32:22) Chafe
comes to the rightful conclusion that
"...givenness is a status decided on by the speaker, and that it
is fundamentally a matter of the speakers belief that the
item is in the addressee's
consciousness...." (Chafe
32:36)
This in turn would be
influenced by such factors as "the number of intervening sentences" (Chafe
32:48) or "the effect of such discourse boundaries as a change of scene." (Chafe
33:02)
Topic entities, by simple
repetition, may achieve a higher degree of givenness
as observed in the quote below.
"Alternatively, in other types of
discourse, there may be an overwhelming tendency to reserve pronouns for
reference to <topic entities> in the discourse" (Brown and Yule 221:26)
Other factors seem also
intuitively to be possible. Perhaps NP's remain given longer than VP's etc, while explicitly formulated NP's may retain their given
status longer than implied NP's.
Given
as theme
Unlike
the above proposals, this definition is "clause bound" in that any clause can be
assigned a theme/rheme status irrespective of past
discourse and/or predictability.
" Basically, theme is what
comes first in the clause; and while this
means that there is in the unmarked case an association of the theme with the given, the two are independent
options. The difference can perhaps best
be summarized by the observation that while <given> means <what you were talking about> (or
<what I was talking about before>),
<theme> means <what I am talking about> (or <what I am
talking about now>); and, as any student of rhetoric knows, the two do not
necessarily coincide. (H.A.HALLIDAY
212;05)
Such a model allows some
interesting observations. Hence, D.J.Allerton has pointed out that the speaker,
in choosing a certain NP
to appear at the beginning of a clause, is granting it the status
of 'psychological subject' (i.e.
theme). He also observes that Greenberg’s 1st Universal is 'subject before
object' c.f. SVO, VSO, SOV (all unmarked in the surface). Therefore, the 'theme'
and the 'subject' of a clause are often the same. But beyond this simple observation, the
model runs into serious difficulties. The crux of the matter seems to be that theme is
mapped onto structure and the
latter is moulded by other factors e.g. syntax, transitivity etc (as discussed
by Halliday 218-223)
Therefore, we may find our choice
of "theme" dictated at times by such considerations. This becomes apparent when
we look at languages other than English where the first morpheme, word, phrase
or clause cannot occur initially in the corresponding English sentence. If the
first item truly represents the "psychological" starting point, then we seem
justified in inferring that all humans do NOT have the same general
"psychological make-up." We can do
two things at this point to extricate ourselves from this quandrum. We can state that "theme" has as much (if not
more) to do with syntactic structure of sentences than psychological processes
as does Halliday in the above quote, or we can state
that languages do indeed mould our "psychological" processes. Neither question
is tackled here. The general point has been to show that the debate regarding
"theme/rheme" has shed but little light on the
question of
Given
as shared knowledge (presupposition)
Prince labelled her final definition as
"shared knowledge" but I will henceforth treat it as "presupposition" since this
title is more common in the literature.
"The speaker assumes that the
hearer "knows", assumes, or can infer a particular thing (but is not necessarily
thinking about it) (Prince 230:34)
Jackendoff offers us a more exact definition of what this
may mean in reality and how it is obtained (although the model below concerns
itself with true assertive statements only, alterations having to be made for
imperatives and interrogatives. His
procedure works in three steps, the first of which is
".... focus assignment derives two
formal objects from the otherwise determined semantic representation SR of a
sentence S. The first, the focus, consists of that semantic material associated
with surface structure nodes dominated by the marker F. The second is a
one-place predicate presupposition (x) formed by replacing the focus by an
appropriate semantic variable x in SR." (Jackendoff
245:14)
His second step is designed to rule out
false presuppositions and ties his formalism to "the particular universe of
discourse" of which the speaker might be talking.
"The second step in the
derivation constructs another formal object, the presuppositional set, defined as the set of values which,
when substituted for x in presupposition (x), yield a true proposition".(Jackendoff
245:29)
His third step is the merging of
the presupposition and focus to give us the assertion of the sentence. Of
course, the focus must be a member of the presuppositional set and the presuppositional set itself is constrained in certain ways
e.g. is a coherent set and amenable to discussion.
The rather heavy formalisms above
can be exemplified as chose Jackendoff to do. Taking
the sentence
John LIKES Bill
the
presupposition seems to be
the
relation between John and Bill is (x)
(by replacement of the focus by an appropriate semantic
variable (x) in SR.
and
the presuppositional set (which is represented by the
lambda notation )
is
the relation between John and Bill is x is
and
as said, the focus must be a member of the presuppositional set
like
x the relation between John
and Bill is x
Returning to Prince's definition,
it is noticeable that her final definition (shared knowledge) is more extensive
than the others. Prince herself noticed this.
"Although different from one
another, predictability, saliency, and "shared knowledge" are not mutually
independent: If a speaker assumes that the hearer can predict that some
particular item or items will occur in some particular position within a
sentence, then the speaker must assume that it is appropriate that the hearer
have some particular thing in his/her
consciousness. And if the speaker assumes that the hearer has some
particular thing in his/her consciousness, then the speaker must assume that the
hearer has some assumption or can draw some inference". (Prince
231:29)
Her conclusion is that her first
two definitions are somehow incorporated by "shared
knowledge"
"Thus an understanding of giveness in the sense of "shared knowledge"........ is germane (and, perhaps , prerequisite ) to an understanding
of giveness in the other two senses....(Prince
232:17)
Consequently, all items that aren't
"presupposed" (assumed by the speaker to be shared knowledge
) are liable to take
An infinite number of sentences
are possible where a "presupposed" item does receive
She RAN to the shops (said mockingly of a fat
woman)
ROBERT couldn't have cooked
this meal (said
disparagingly of Robert)
He's going to see JANE
tonight ( JANE being said in such
a
way as to indicate that he loves her)
That emotionally charged words are
stressed shouldn't surprise us. It seems to be a universal fact that the pitch
in the human voice is raised when the speaker is in an emotional state. The
problem is incorporating the phenomenon indicated above by the sentences into a
coherent and correct theory of
PART
2.
THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEEP STRUCTURE (DS), SURFACE STRUCTURE (SS),
Having now sketched the outline of the presupposition/focus model, I wish
to look at various aspects of it in greater detail. The most useful debates seem to have
stemmed from Chomsky in his article "Deep Structure, Surface Structure and
Semantic Interpretation".
He begins by asking whether presupposition/focus is present in the Deep
Structure (DS) as well as in the Surface Structure (SS). Since, up until recent
times, the DS and perhaps the intermediate Underlying levels (UL) were believed
to account for a great deal of the semantic import of an SS, it seemed only
reasonable to expect to find presupposition/focus in the DS. However, on the
other hand, we have just seen that presupposition and focus in the SS are
apparently demarcated by stress assignment. The latter is of course a
phonological phenomenon and can't be represented in the DS which is syntactic and
autonomous to the phonological
component. If
presupposition/focus is to be represented in the DS, it would have to be done
syntactically. Chomsky used a number of famous examples to develop the argument
including
3) Was it a) an ex-convict with a red SHIRT
It
wasn't
b) a red shirted EX-CONVICT
c) an ex-convict with a shirt that is
RED
that he was warned to look out for?
and its
proposed US
3US) The one he was
warned to look out for was X
If
it’s DS that determines presupposition/focus, then from the presupposition of
all the sentences in 3 i.e.
3 P) He was warned to look out for
someone.
we can state
that the foci of 3a ,b & c are respectively
4) a) An ex-convict with a red
SHIRT
b) A red shirted
EX-CONVICT
c) An ex-convict
with a shirt that is RED
Moreover,
3a,b, & c can all be answered by the response
5) No, he was warned to look out for
an AUTOMOBILE
salesman.
This
isn’t surprising since 4a,b & c are paraphrases of
each other.
But
now Chomsky invites us to consider the possible responses
6a) No, he was warned to look out
for an ex-con with a
red TIE.
6b) No, he was warned to look out
for a red-shirted
AUTOMOBILE
salesman
6c) No, he was warned to look out
for an ex-convict with
a shirt that is GREEN.
Clearly,
6a) is the only natural reply to 3a), 6b) is the only natural reply to 3b) and the same
holds for the relationship between 6c)
and 3c). Chomsky concludes that the above pairings and their lack of interchangeability are due to "the alternative
conception of presupposition and
focus as determined by the intonation centre of surface structure. (Chomsky
201:26) Sometimes however, there is a relationship between DS, the
"The strongest statement that we
can make is that in cleft sentences, the focus must be included in the clefted phrase, and that the presupposition includes the
lowest clause." (Jackendoff
233:04)
and
this is illustrated by an example taken from Chomsky and modified by Jackendoff.
7) It was an ex-convict with a red shirt
that he was warned
to
look out for
I
have marked the possible foci conforming with Jackendoff's statement. Although then, there
is a tenuous relationship between DS, SS, the USA rule and Presupposition/Focus
in English, Chomsky points out that
equally, there are other sentences where the DS clearly has nothing to do
with the presupposition/focus in the SS and that it is the USA rule and SS
together that decide the presupposition/focus exclusively. This is well
illustrated where a focused phrase would not correspond to a phrase in the DS at
all. Taking the sentence
8) Is John certain to
win?
and
the natural responses
9a) No, John is certain to
LOSE
9b) No, John is likely not even to be
NOMINATED
9c) No, the election will never take
PLACE
9b)
would seem to be an answer to a question where "certain to win” is taken as the
focused phrase. But if we accept
the DS of 8) as
8DS) [ John win ] is
certain
we
can see that "certain to win" is not a DS constituent. In essence then, what is
needed is a formal rule stating the relationship between SS, the
"One
artificial construct is required: a syntactic marker F which can be associated
with any node in the surface structure".(Jackendoff 240:18)
He
continues
"Two
systems of rules will make use of the marker F, one in the semantics and one in
the phonology. The former system contains at least the rule of focus assignment,
which we will present here in preliminary form.
(Focus
assignment, first approximation)
The
semantic material associated with surface structure nodes dominated by F is the
focus of the sentence. To derive
the Presupposition, substitute appropriate semantic variables for the focused
material". (240:30)
THE
FOCUSING OF CONSTITUENTS
Let
us now turn away from the discussion of SS, DS & Semantic interpretation in
order to discuss another separate but related topic which, up to now has been
implicitly assumed whenever necessary in the examples.
This is the relationship between
"If a phrase P is chosen as the focus of
a sentence S, the
highest
stress in S will be on the syllable of P that is
assigned
highest stress by the regular stress
rules".(Jackendoff
237:09)
Let us now see how this rule of
stress assignment functions. Using the phrase structure diagram produced
below
Jackendoff
points out that if the speaker wants to stress NP1 or 2, then, since
the
"...articles and the
preposition are treated as
proclitic by the stress
rules..."(Jackendoff 238:06)
the
stress will fall on the main stress of whichever noun he wishes to
stress.
Should the speaker wish to stress VP1 or
S1, "hammer" will receive stress in both cases since
"..the Nuclear
Stress Rule puts [ 1 stress ] on the final
constituent."(Jackendoff
238:12).
The emerging pattern is clear to
see but difficult to put into words. Stressing the rightmost content (as opposed
to grammatical word) in a P, causes that P to be in
focus. Furthurmore, we can move up the phrase
structure to superordinate Ps (reaching even S) and
say that these Ps are also in focus so long as they don't govern any material
that appears to the right of the word that was stressed.
The ambiguity that this might
cause as in the case where "hammer" is stressed and consequently NP3 alone, or
NP3+PP1, or NP3+PP1+VP1,or NP3+PP1+VP1+S (ie S ), is
partly disambiguated in Jackendoffs mind by
"...further subtleties of stress
and intonation"
(Jackendoff 238:17)
One more observation needs to be
added here. If we were to stress the word "judge" in the above example, then the
focused P(s) could be NP2, or NP2+VP1. But the second option is less likely.
Why?
"... that when expressive or
contrastive stress shifts intonation centre, the same principle applies as in
normal cases for determining focus and presupposition, but with the additional
proviso that naturalness declines far more sharply as larger and larger phrases
containing the intonation centre are considered as a possible focus". (Chomsky
204:44).
STRESS,
FOCUS, AND NEGATION.
We have now seen a number of arguments
which suggest that certain semantic interpretations (meanings) are expressed
only in the SS. We can now look at further evidence which supports this
conclusion while making us aware of yet another phenomena involving stress.
Consider the sentence
Maxwell didnt kill the judge with a silver hammer.
(Jackendoff 257:25)
and the
possible conditions under which this denial would be true i.e.
Not Maxwell &/or not kill
&/or not silver &/or not (the) judge.
If any of the above situations
hold, then the sentence is true. This is why some linguists would say that
negative sentences are vague rather than ambiguous.
However, if the sentence is said
with main stress on the word, let us say, Maxwell, then
we seem justified in inferring
Someone killed the judge with a
silver hammer.
It wasnt
Maxwell that killed the judge with a silver
hammer.
(Not Maxwell)
Similar inferences can be made if
the stress should fall on another word instead. The stressed constituent seems
to come under the focus of negation to the exclusion of all
others.
Why should we believe that such
differences in meaning are not represented in the DS
?
Well firstly, we would have to have as
many DS's as there are surface interpretations.( At
least five for the above sentence).
Secondly, the original ideas
behind DS meant that we should be able to formulate a clefted construction expressing the + focus and -focus(presupposition) constituents clearly. This is not
always possible though.
*It wasnt(a)hammer that Maxwell
killed the judge with a
silver (one(of)).(Jackendoff
255:14)
The above arguments then not only
confirm our earlier conclusions on DS,SS and Semantic
Interpretation; that its SS and
As before, we can find both
syntactic and semantic constraints on what words/constituents can come under
focus.
In
a sentence such as
"I know that your sister doesn't like
the chocolates"
we never seem
able to infer
a) not "I"
and/or
b) not
"know".
however we
choose to stress the utterance. The material in the superordinate clause can never come within the focus of
"not" which appears in the subordinate clause and this seems best described as a
syntactic constraint.
More interesting though, Jackendoff seems to have found a type of example where the
focus of negation is constrained by semantic considerations rather than
syntactic ones. He points out that sentences with
focused instrumentals such as
Maxwell didn’t kill the judge with
a silver HAMMER
cannot have a
reading where the instrument is focused syntactically (by clefting) but is not associated with the negation (because
it appears to the left of the neg)
e.g.
*It was with a HAMMER that Max didn’t
kill the judge.
cf It
was with a hammer that Max killed the judge.
He concludes that the ungrammaticality
of the above sentence is because it makes little sense to talk of using an
instrument in order for not having done something. That the ungrammaticality of
this sentence is pragmatic rather than syntactic is suggested by the fact that
the similar sentence without negation is acceptable. Such initial observations
lead to other findings. If the focused instrumental must be associated with
negation, then the ungrammaticality of
*With a hammer, Max didn’t kill
the judge.
is no doubt due
to the fact that the preposed constituent is outside
the scope of negation (for syntactic reasons alluded to
above).
cf With a
hammer, Max killed the judge.
where
preposing of the PP is allowed. Hence, Jackendoff has shown that
a) Semantic interpretations depend
on SS as well as DS
b) That negation focuses on
certain words and
constituents and that this focusing is constrained by
certain syntactic and semantic
considerations.
STRESS
AND COREFERENTIALITY.
In the previous section, we saw that the
assignment of
We shall now see that the assignment of
However, the question of
coreferentiality of nouns in English isn't settled merely by
Before giving examples of cases
where USA indicate for us which reading of a sentence is the speakers intended
one, let me just illustrate for the reader cases where the semantic component of
the grammar or pragmatics constrain or strongly suggest the intended reading
(the difficulties of distinguishing between semantic and pragmatic inferences is
of little importance generally in this paper but I believe the first two
examples beneath to be semantic and the last two
pragmatic)
1) The cup fell on its microchip.
( "Its" can't refer to "cup" since cups don’t have
microchips)
2) The woman has just given birth to her
first child.
("Her"
refers to "the woman" since you cant
give
birth to another persons child, matters of
surrogate
mothers etc left aside)
3) She took her trousers
off.
("Her" refers to "she").
4) During the fight, he took a knife to his
throat
("His"
refers to someone other than "he")
Akmajian
and Jackendoff (A&J) in a short squib and
discussion suggest that "contrastive stress" prohibits coreferentiality and
furnish us with many examples divided into three cases. The first case is where
"contrastive stress on either a pronoun or noun will prohibit co reference"
(sentence 5-9)
5) After he woke up, JOHN went to
town.
6) After HE woke up, John went to
town.
5) & 6) are understod as not being co referential
c.f.
7) After he woke up, John went to
town. (ambiguous)
8) John hit Bill and then George hit
him (him = Bill)
9) John hit Bill and then George hit
HIM (HIM = John)
The second case is where
"contrastive stress" is necessary to get any reading at
all"
10) John hit Bill and then HE was hit
by Ira
(He = John) c.f.
11) * John hit Bill and then he was hit by
Ira
Before examining the third case, let us
discuss the data up to now.
Starting with the second case, we can
find syntactically parallel sentences where there is no need for contrastive
stress to be assigned in order to derive a grammatical sentence
e.g.
11a) John hit Bill and then he was
arrested by the
police
The pragmatics of the sentence seems to
be enough to allow correct coreferentiality to take place (He = John) without
further aid from contrastive stress. Indeed, if the above sentence had stressed
"he" as sentence 10, it probably would have been interpreted as "HE" = Bill
e.g.
10a) John hit Bill and then HE was
arrested by the
police
The reasons for the
"discrepancies" between 10,11 & 10a,11a respectively is that contrastive
stress does not indicate coreferentiality directly but via the intermediary of
pragmatics.
Grice’s Maxims of Quality and
Relevance apply and all other things being equal, we will apply them in order to
get
a
certain reading from a sentence (hopefully, the one intended by the speaker
since he too assumes Grice’s Maxims to be operative).
But when there is an indication
that the Maxims are momentarily dispensed with, (by the placement of contrastive
stress as in 10 where an active subject becomes a passive subject) or there is
an indication that our normal pragmatic reasoning should be momentarily
dispensed with (as in 10a where the victim is arrested
) we read the sentence contrary to normal pragmatic procedure.
In their first case, the normal
pragmatic procedure is to read the sentence co-referentially but stress
appearing on either the noun or pronoun warns us that this norm is suspended.
However, where the sentence has only one noun and pronoun e.g. 5 or 6, it is
impossible to construct counter-examples where contrastive stress suggests a
co-referential reading.
With regard to Akmajian and Jackendoff's third
case, I shall say very little since I'm not sufficiently familiar enough with
theories of pronominalization and the construction of cleft sentences. However,
their observations that pronominalized items and
proper nouns in certain circumstances can't be co-referential
12) *It was John's dog that he bit. * Denotes non-
Coreferentiality
are
by no means without doubt attributable to constraints on pronominalization
and/or coreferentiality exclusively. The grammaticality of the sentence below
(13) suggests that the constraint might rather have something to do with
theories of relativization as proposed by Keenan and
Comrie 1972
since
13) is exactly like 12) in that the pronoun is both preceded by and commanded by
a proper noun and yet only 13 can be co-referential.
13) It was John's dog that bit
him.
With regards to sentences such as
14) *In his apartment, Mary kissed
John. (*
A&J)
15) In his rotting hovel of an
apartment on Scrac
Street Mary finally broke down and kissed him.
I'm not convinced by Akmajian and Jackendoff's
explanation.
"We think that the relevant
principle in these cases is that as the sentence becomes longer, the relative
stress level of the NP's and pronoun decreases with respect to the clauses
containing them. This would seem to relate to Case 1, where contrastive stress precluded
coreferentiality".(Akmajian and Jackendoff 126:22)
Firstly, I have shown that contrastive
stress doesn't directly give us a reading of non-coreferentiality but rather
warns us against assigning a normal pragmatic reading to a
sentence.
Secondly, Akmajian and Jackendoff seem to be
proposing a multi-level stress system with their comments above. This is
problematic and has been dismissed by other phoneticians when discussing
intonation.
Finally, I can make a tentative proposal
as to why 14) is ungrammatical and 15) isn't. The fronting of certain
constituents of a sentence that aren't normally clause initial is often carried
out to "highlight" them and is therefore accompanied by receiving a focus
stress. (This process is often referred to as "topicalization" or as a marked theme) Sentence 14)
immediately becomes grammatical if we assign such a stress focus
e.g.
14a) In his
APARTMENT Mary kissed John.
We could equally assign focus
stress to "his", but without a context to help, the reading is ambiguous since
there is a conflict of interest between the pragmatic rules I have referred to
above and the rule of focus stress.
The pragmatic rules would say that
stressing "his" warns us not to read the sentence co referentially as would
normally be the case i.e.
14b) In HIS apartment Mary kissed John.
("His" is
someone other than John who is in the
discourse).
But the rules of Topicalization allow "His" to be stressed without putting
any such constraints on coreferentiality. e.g.
14c) In which
apartment did they kiss?
In HIS apartment Mary kissed John. (John's)
The more we find that we need
recourse to pragmatics, the more certain it is that Akmajian and Jackendoff's examples
cannot be solved by rules of pronominalization and coreferentiality alone. A
major problem on finding an ungrammatical sentence is deciding EXACTLY why that
sentence is ungrammatical. If we can subsume any reasons under more general
principles, then we are probably more correct in our analysis than were those
before us.
LIST
OF REFERENCES
AKMAJIAN
A. AND JACKENDOFF R. (1970) Coreferentiality and
Stress
(sqibs and
discussions)
LI 1
ALLERTON
D.J. AND CRUTTENDEN A. (1978) Three reasons for
accenting a definite
subject JL 15-16
BOLINGER
D. (1972) Accent is predictable (if you're a mind
reader LG 48
BRESNAN
J.W. (1971) Sentence Stress And
Syntactic
Transformations
LG 47
BROWN
G. AND YULE G. (1983) Discourse Analysis CUP
CHAFE
W.L. (1976) Giveness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness,
Subjects, Topics, and Point of View.
Subject and Topic ed Li
C.N.
CHOMSKY
N. (1971) Deep structure, surface structure, and
semantic interpretation
ed Steinberg D.D. and Jakobovits L.A.
CUP
CRUTTENDEN
A. (1986) Intonation CUP
GUSSENHOVEN
C. (1983) Focus, Mode and the Nucleus JL 19
HALLIDAY
M.A.K. (1967) Notes on transitivity and theme in
English (Part 2 ) JL
3-4
JACKENDOFF
R.S. (1972) Semantic Interpretation in Generative
Grammar MIT Press
LI
C.N. AND THOMPSON
Typology of Language
Subject and Topic ed Li
C.N.
Academic Press
PRINCE
E.F. (1981) Toward a Taxonomy of
Given-New
Information
Radical Pragmatics ed Cole P.
Academic
Press
SCHMERLING
S.F. (1972) A Re-examination of "
LG 50
*
The remarks regarding "psychological reality" and categorization are not my own
but something that I came across while reading on another topic. Unfortunately,
I haven't been able to retrace the work to give the author full credit.