In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS)/information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—t...

The article explores aspects of the role of prosody as a contextualization cue in aphasic conversation through auditory and acoustic analysis of an aphasic speaker's use of pitch variation in responses to closed yes/no-requests. The results reveal two prosodic realizations of 'yes' and 'no' contextualizing different kinds of responses: a flat realization with no prolongation and minimal pauses,...

The article represents the results of a phonetic experiment devoted to study pragmatically, and stylistically determined manifestation directive speech acts in modern German language. allowed establishing prosodic invariant act describing variant patterns realized diverse situational conditions which demonstrated different degree categoricalness revealed their differential character on level ex...

This paper presents results concerning the relationship between word structure in terms of number of syllables and tonal realization in Mandarin. It examines whether the fact that a word (in our context a prosodic word) is more complex implies certain tonal reductions. Our hypothesis is that a monosyllabic word will be uttered more carefully than a polysyllabic word due to the potentially large...

It is widely recognized that prosody serves as a cue for information content and for mutual agreement (or lack thereof) among dialogue participants. It is also true that different social situations require dissimilar prosodic strategies. The present paper will address the problem of prosodic prominence and contours on negatives in various interactive and noninteractive registers of Continental ...

Models for the prediction of prosodic events, such as pitch accents and phrasal boundaries, often rely on machine learning models that combine a set of input features aggregated over a finite, and usually short, number of observations to model context. Dynamic models go a step further by explicitly incorporating a model of state sequence, but even then, many practical implementations are limite...

While the realization of focus in languages which express focus either syntactically or prosodically or through a combination of both prosody and syntax has been studied relatively extensively, e.g. English (Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986), Korean (Cho 1990, Jun 1993), Chichewa (Kanerva 1990), Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991, Lahiri and Fitzpatrick-Cole 1999), Shanghai Chinese (Selkirk and Shen ...

This study investigated prosodic realization of discourse topic by comparing professional and non-professional speakers’ production of four discourses. In each discourse, the target sentence, as the discourse topic, was either at the discourse initial position or at a non-initial position. Six professional and 20 non-professional speakers read aloud all the discourses with two repetitions. Exte...

This study investigated individual differences in the use of prosodic structure in the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in English, exploring listeners’ sensitivity to the placement of prosodic boundaries in the parsing of relative clauses. Previous work, carried out in the context of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, has shown that variation in “autistic”like personality traits in neurotypical...

While previous studies have successfully revealed areas vulnerable to disfluency at the word level in stuttering, identifying the specific factors responsible for this instability has proved difficult. Analyzing the effects of phrasal prosody, which governs such word-level factors as lexical stress [1], is critical in order to account for the relations between wordlevel and phrase-level effects...