Discourse structural constraints on accent in narrative

This chapter examines the relationship between discourse structure and intonational prominence or pitch accent. It is argued, based on the distribution of pitch accent in an unrestricted spontaneous narrative, that accent function must be interpreted against a dynamic background of linguistic factors, including grammatical function, lexical form, and discourse structure as formulated within the computational discourse modeling framework presented by Grosz and Sidner [GS86]. A generalization emerges from analysis of the spontaneous narrative that accent functions as a marker of the attentional status of entities in a discourse model. The results of this study may be applied in message-to-speech synthesis systems to enable richer and more meaningful prosodic variation.

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