Predicting Prosodic Phrasing

Prosodic phrasing is an inherent part of the language mechanism. The conditions, though, that determine it, even though they have been a research topic for linguists for over two decades, are far from precisely determined and widely accepted. This thesis will present the results of a project in which an attempt was made to explore the reasons underlying the speakers’ choice of prosodic phrasing and identify regularities or constraints, which have been proposed over the years to govern it. The work departs from the comparison between two different proposals on the relation between syntactic and prosodic structure, namely Truckenbrodt’s (1999) syntax-based approach and Steedman’s (2000b) Information Structure based theory, and ends up identifying a third proposal, that of Nespor & Vogel’s (1986), as the one which better predicts the partition of the test utterances into Phonological Phrases. All proposals were assessed with respect to ToBI boundary strength tiers in a set of 451 annotated sentences of the BURadio News corpus.

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