Wagner & Mcauliffe (2019) – The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing
Michael Wagner, Michael Mcauliffe
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004863
October 2019
Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of int
onational tune), the syntactic constituent structure (which mainly affects prosodic phrasing), and the location of semantic focus (which mainly affects the relative p
rosodic prominence between words). The syntactic and semantic functional dimensions (speech act, constituency, focus) are orthogonal to each other, but to which exten
t their prosodic correlates are remains controversial. This paper reports on a production experiment that crosses these three dimensions to look for interactions, con
centrating on interactions between focus prominence and phrasing. The results provide evidence that interactions are more limited than many current theories of senten
ce prosody would predict, and support a theory that keeps different prosodic dimensions representationally separate.

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004863
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Journal of Phonetics
keywords: prosody prominence focus phrasing intonation deaccenting, phonology