Marking boundaries: intonation units and prosodic sentences

1993

Research on intonation and discourse falls into two major categories: work on the intonational correlates of discourse structure and work on accent and information status. In both categories, problems of specifying an adequate and independently motivated ...

Journal of Modern Languages, 2003

The central focus of this article is to present a description of the prosodic features manifested in Malay spoken discourse and the segmentative function they perform in their loci of occurrences. To attain this goal, the study relies on a detailed analysis of transcribed recordings of selected fragments of Malay broadcast interviews. By adopting a descriptive framework that recognises prosody as consisting of prosodic resources such as pitch, loudness, tempo and pause, I am able to present a formal characterisation of prosodic realisations in Malay spoken discourse. And by examining these prosodic cues in a segmentational system in the context of adjacency pairs, I am able to account for the relationship between prosodic manifestations and the segmentative function they fulfill in actual interaction. The article presents argument for segmenting discourse into units of speech whose boundaries are defined by audible phonetic cues. The conclusion is that this less restrictive framewor...

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Proceedings of the 1st …, 2000

This paper presents an empirical analysis of prosodic phenomena (intonation and timing) in 'common ground units' (Nakatani & Traurn 1999). The analysis is used to address questions of the role of prosody in dialogue while taking into account the complexities of multispeaker discourse.

A corpus-driven study of discourse intonation. Amsterdam: Benjamins 2008. x+325 pp. (ISBN 978-90-272-2306-7 (hb))

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1997

This paper presents the design and the evaluation of a method to study prosodic features of discourse structure in unrestricted spontaneous speech. Past work has indicated that one of the major difficulties that discourse prosody analysts have to overcome is finding an independent specification of hierarchical discourse structure as to avoid circularity. Previous studies have tried to solve this problem by constraining the discourse or by basing segmentations on a specific discourse theory. The current investigation first explores the possibility of experimentally determining discourse boundaries in unrestricted speech. In a next stage, it is investigated to what extent boundaries obtained in this way correlate with specific prosodic variables: the features pause, pitch range, and type of boundary tone are studied as a function of discourse structure.

speechinaction.net

Although usually taken for granted, it is anything but clear that prosodic elements are organized into autonomous prosodic structures such as intonational phrases. A framework is outlined within which the structural and communicative organization of prosodic elements in samples of natural discourse might be discovered inductively. The framework assumes that the structural organization of a stretch of speech consists of the set of recurrent patterns it contains (including prosodic patterns), and that such patterns are recognizable to speakers. It is further hypothesized that in the normal or usual case, logically independent patterns (e.g., the placement of pauses vs. the placement of intonational cadences) will converge or unify; and that if they do not unify, speakers may draw special pragmatic inferences from this fact. Three samples of natural speech are analyzed in order to present the approach and demonstrate three key properties of the prosodic structure that it uncovers: (a) the potential independence of prosodic patterns and thematic structure; (b) the potential for bundles of prosodic elements to recur as prosodic 'macrostructures,' often associated by speakers with particular styles, contexts, and social personas; (c) the potential for prosodic patterns (and elements) to carry meaning that is iconic in character, but regulated by culturally specific conventions and practices.

Journal of Linguistics (submitted), 2020

Féry's "Intonation and Prosodic Structure" (henceforth F2017) is a state-of-the-art survey of the relationship between prosody, morphosyntax and information structure. The book contains highly didactic introductions to the relevant topics such that it can also serve as a textbook for graduate level courses, and possibly for advanced undergraduate courses. Each chapter is complemented with discussion questions and refers the reader to seminal literature discussed in each of the topics treated in each of the chapters. F2017 does not discuss the literature in prosodic phonology in an uncritical fashion but argues for specific assumptions about the way prosodic structure and intonation interact with other parts of grammar. These assumptions can be summarized as follows: (i) Indirect reference theory: Phonological processes do not index morphosyntactic structure directly but make reference to the prosodic hierarchy (ii) Prosodic hierarchy hypothesis: All languages have a fixed set of phonological constituents that are built from mapping principles that refer to morphosyntactic structure; (iii) Recursive prosodic layer hypothesis: Prosodic layers (can) display recursion; (iv) Autosegmental metrical hypothesis: Tones are assigned to a hierchically organized metrical structure and syllables not specified with tones receive their pitch via interpolation; (v) Alignment theory of phonology information structure interactions: Information structural categories such as focus and topic relate to alignment constraints at the syntax-phonology interface rather than directly to phonetic content.

2002

The aim of this paper is to present the multi-linear approach being developed among the ProDiGE research group at the Institut de Phonétique of the Laboratoire Parole & Langage (Université de Provence) in Aix-en-Provence. We first introduce the conceptual bases of this approach, before focusing our attention on the prosodic levels which constitute one of the lines in our formal and functional representation. In the last part, we present a sample analysis grid of part of our spontaneous speech corpus, detailing each level in turn.