The goal of this study is to investigate the structuring of speech in terms of prosodic boundaries in spontaneous dialogues in Swedish. In particular, the relation between boundaries as perceived by listeners, and their acoustic and linguistic realizations as uttered by speakers is examined.

One central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less well-studied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamental syntactic components which identify a clause ...

This paper deals with alternative questions in English, and proposes an analysis employing an alternative operator. I claim that the alternative question interpretation is not obtained by such syntactic processes as movement or gapping, but by scoping of an alternative operator that originates from the conjunction or. Accordingly, while the syntactic forms of alternative questions contain nothi...

The hypothesis of the autonomy of syntax makes special demands on one of the central issues in linguistic theory: the specification of correspondences between a lexical conceptual and syntactic structure. One strategy is to distinguish several layers of lexical representation and allow only one of them to be "visible" to syntactic and morphological processes (cf. Pinker 1989, Grimshaw 1990). A ...

A foundational assumption of traditional generative grammar is that a grammar is organized in the mind of the speaker as a number of hermetically sealed modules, which in the course of a derivation hand off data one to the other.1 Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) assumes that the grammar contains no such modules, but rather that grammar is an inventory of signs, complexes of linguistic co...

This document describes the lexical interface for nite-state syntax as it is currently implemented and used for the development of the French constraint grammar. The system includes nite-state transducers for multiword expressions, for capitalised, misspelt or unknown words and for accent recovery. It also encodes general multiword expressions such as dates or idioms. The tokeniser includes a n...

The topic of this paper is the manner in which syntactic voice alternations (and syntactic configurations more generally) relate to voice morphology, and the implications of this for theories of voice and theories of morphology/syntax interactions. I argue based on the voice system of Modern Greek for three primary points: first, that treatments taking voice morphology as corresponding to a syn...

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody or, more informally, ' tone of voice' can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked. However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contribution of prosody, exactly how...