Towards a Quantitative Theory of Variability: Language, brain and computation

Relations between di erent components of linguistic analysis, such as prosody, morphol- ogy, syntax, semantics, discourse, etc. remains a problem for a systematic description (see [Blache03]). However, this is a main challenge not only from a theoretical point of view, but also for natural language processing, especially in human/machine communication systems or speech processing (e.g. synthesis). Several phenomena highlighting such relations has been described. This is typically the case for relations existing between prosody and syntax (see [Selkirk84], [DiCristo85] or [Bear90]). However, explanations are often empirical and excep-tionally given in the perspective of an actual theory of language. It is for example possible to specify some relations existing between topicalization and syllable duration (cf. [Doetjes02]) or between prosodic architecture and discourse organization after focus (cf. [DiCristo99]). However, the modularity perspective, which relies on the independence of linguistic compo- nents, remains the rule in this kind of description and does not support a global vision of the problem