Syntax and prosody in a Danish Text-to-Speech System

T his p ap er is structured as follow s: In section 1. w e p resen t the basic structure o f a D anish tex t-to -speech system (hencefo rth T T S -system ), and illustrate som e o f the special needs o f T T S -system s as com pared w ith o th e r natural language processing system s (N L P-system s). In th is connection w e exem plify so m e cases o f syntactically determ ined stress loss in D anish. In section 2. w e presen t and d iscuss som e p relim inary resu lts o f an em pirical investiga tion o f the relation betw een syntactic structure and pause d istribu tion in read-aloud D arush p rose . In section 3. w e describe a specialised g ram m ar form alism fo r exp ressing sy n tac tic as w ell as m orphological and phonological s tructu re , and w e ou tline the parsing stra tegy used to transform input sentences to phonetically consisten t and p rosod ica lly adequate transcrip tions w ith special em phasis on how to ach ieve robustness.