07 Nov 2006

Sasha Calhoun

Prosody is one of the most important means by which information structure, i.e. the salience and organisation of information in relation to a discourse model, is signalled in English. It has been standardly argued that information structure is primarily signalled by the distribution of pitch accents within syntax structure, as well as intonation event type. I argue that the relevant cases can be much better accounted for if we regard information structure as a strong probabilistic constraint on metrical prosodic structure. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Switchboard corpus is presented in support of this account.

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