Prosody In Syntactic Encoding

Die Buchreihe Linguistische Arbeiten hat mit über 500 Bänden zur linguistischen Theoriebildung der letzten Jahrzehnte in Deutschland und international wesentlich beigetragen. Die Reihe wird auch weiterhin neue Impulse für die Forschung setzen und die zentrale Einsicht der Sprachwissenschaft präsentieren, dass Fortschritt in der Erforschung der menschlichen Sprachen nur durch die enge Verbindung von empirischen und theoretischen Analysen sowohl diachron wie synchron möglich ist. Daher laden wir hochwertige linguistische Arbeiten aus allen zentralen Teilgebieten der allgemeinen und einzelsprachlichen Linguistik ein, die aktuelle Fragestellungen bearbeiten, neue Daten diskutieren und die Theorieentwicklung vorantreiben.

What is the role of prosody in the generation of sentence structure? A standard notion holds that prosody results from mapping a hierarchical syntactic structure onto a linear sequence of words. A radically different view conceives of certain intonational features as integral components of the syntactic structure. Yet another conception maintains that prosody and syntax are parallel systems that mutually constrain each other to yield surface sentential form. The different viewpoints reflect the various functions prosody may have: On the one hand, prosody is a signal to syntax, marking e.g. constituent boundaries. On the other hand, prosodic or intonational features convey meaning; the concept “intonational morpheme” (as e.g. an exponent of information structural notions like topic or focus) puts prosody and intonation squarely into the syntactic representation. The proposals collected in this book tackle the intricate relationship of syntax and prosody in the encoding of sentences. The contributions build their cases on the basis of solid empirical evidence, adducing data from experiments or from the careful analysis of natural speech. The volume thus represents a state of the art survey of research on the syntax-phonology interface.

Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions. In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference. The articles in this special issue tackle a number of key questions: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories on prosody?

The articles compiled in this volume offer new insights into the wealth of prosodic and syntactic phenomena involved in the encoding of information structure categories. They present data from languages which are rarely, if ever, taken into account in the most prominent approaches in information structure theory, and which belong to the Afroasiatic, Amerindian, Australian, Caucasian, and Niger-Congo language stocks. In addition to the significant descriptive value of these pioneering contributions, several studies also draw attention to previously undescribed or typologically rare phenomena. By adapting a variety of methods to under-described and endangered languages, ranging from experimental to naturalistic corpus studies, this volume also aims to serve as an invitation for further research in this direction.

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

This collection of papers is the third volume of the series “Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics” (UBLI), a product of the 21st Century COE Program of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). Prosody, as used in this text, appears in units larger than segments and generally refers to the field that studies various phonological properties connected to utterances involving pitch, intensity, and length. These phonetic features almost always appear within complex combinations such as word and sentence accents and intonation. The subtitle, Cross-Linguistic perspectives, does not imply mere, cross-linguistic comparison and contrast of the prosodic phenomena. Rather, it implies that there are a variety of approaches which are unique to each language for prosodic analysis. In fact, the volume consists of prosodic analyses in 12 different languages : French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Makonde, Indonesian, Tagalog and Turkish.

Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is now available again. "Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides evidence for each one from numerous languages. Prosodic Phonology also includes a chapter in which experimental psycholinguistic data support the proposed hierarchy. A perceptual study provides evidence that prosodic constituent structure - not syntactic constituent structure - predicts whether listeners are able to disambiguate different types of ambiguous sentences. A chapter on the phonology of poetic meter examines portions of Dante's Divine Comedy. It is demonstrated that the constituents proposed for spoken language also make interesting predictions about literary metrical patterns. Prosodic Phonology is an important reference not only for phonologists, but for all linguists interested in the issue of interfaces among the components of grammar. It is also a basic resource for psycholinguists and cognitive scientists working on linguistic perception and language acquisition.

Located at the intersection of phonology, psycholinguistics and phonetics, this volume offers the latest research findings in key areas of prosodic theory, including: •The relationship between intonation and pragmatics in speech production •Sentence modality prosody characterization •The role of pitch in quantity-based sound systems •Consonant-conditioned tone depression phonology across languages •The encoding of intonational contrasts in both intonational and tonal languages Featuring new data and ground-breaking results, the papers draw on empirical approaches that analyze production, perception and comprehension experiments such as the prepared speech paradigm and semantic scaling tasks. These are discussed in a variety of languages, some underrepresented in the literature (such as French and Estonian) while others, such as Shekgalagari, are examined in this way for the first time. This collection of cutting-edge material will be of interest to a broad range of language researchers.