Prosodic signaling of information and discourse structure from a typological perspective
نویسندگان
چکیده
This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spontaneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boundary tones are enhanced to mark information structuring. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic signaling of the boundary between Topic and Comment. Discourse structure is reflected in prosody, and we find higher boundary tones near the boundaries between Discourse Units. The results are discussed in terms of a typology of spoken discourse.
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