LING 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Prosodic Unit
24 Dec 2018
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One definition: the acoustic aspects of an utterance that are not due to the choice of words. Phrasing (how do the words of a sentence group together?) Prominence (which words are accented, which ones are not?) These three components are in principle orthogonal to each other: in the sentence john promised to call you can. Shift prominence to the subject or leave it on call" (changing prominence) Raise pitch at the end to ask a question or fall for a declarative (changing the intonational. Add optional boundaries in different locations (changing the phrasing) And you can do these things independently of the others. Prosodic phrasing gives important cues to the syntactic structure of a sentence. There is a close relation between the perceived prosodic grouping in utterances and their constituent structure. For our parties, we invited david and pat or bob, but not all three. For lunch today, he"s having either pork or chicken and fries.
