Prosodic Contours for Auxiliary Phrases

The prosodic contours of the auxiliary phrase of sentences was systematically varied to examine the hypothesis that when the segmental articulation in grammatical units is not made clearly, the information load of these units must be conveyed by syntactic and semantic structure which is partially manifested in the prosodic contour. The syntax of auxiliary phrases is tightly constrained in English, and this syntactic structure is mapped onto the prosodic contour in a preditable way. The prosodic effect of negatives (“He should not have gone”), which appear to be inherently contrastive, is also predictable.