Prosodic and Semantic Properties of Intonational Phrases

Intonational phrases for speech summarization

Extractive speech summarization approaches select relevant segments of spoken documents and concatenate them to generate a summary. The extraction unit chosen, whether a sentence, syntactic constituent, or other segment, has a significant impact on the overall quality and fluency of the summary. Even though sentences tend to be the choice of most the extractive speech summarizers, in this paper...

Relativization, Intonational Phrases and Rich Left Peripheries

Prosodic and intonational domains in speech synthesis

An intonational domain corresponds to the part of an utterance spanned by one intonation contour. We lay out a theory of intonational domains that is rooted in intonational (autosegmental) phonology and prosodic phonology. We focus on restructuring—the process that joins two intonational domains together to form a single domain. We report on a perception experiment about restructuring involving...

Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theory

This paper investigates the intonational phrasing of three types of parenthetical insertions – non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs), full sentences, and comment clauses (CCs) – in actual spoken language. It draws on a large set of data from a corpus of spoken British English. Its aim is twofold: first, it evaluates the correctness of previous claims about the intonational phrasing of parent...

Intonational phonology and prosodic hierarchy in malay

This paper presents original data in support of a new model of intonational phonology for Malay as spoken in Singapore. Building on the Autosegmental-Metrical approach (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986), we propose that intonational variation in Malay can be explained in terms of underlying sequences of abstract tonal units (H and L), which are aligned to the edges and internal syllables of prosod...