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Why do speakers accent ‘‘given’’ information?

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Author

Summary, in English

The accenting of contextually 'given' information constitutes a problem for analyses that regard accents as correlating only with 'new' information. It will be shown that the accenting of 'given' information is explainable as resulting from general metrical well-formedness conditions on prosodic constituents. Units higher than the word are seen to obey the same metrical constraints that are present at the word level.

Publishing year

1991

Language

English

Pages

1279-1282

Document type

Conference - other

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Keywords

  • metrical structure
  • prosodic structure
  • tone-unit
  • intermediate phrase
  • accentual phrase
  • 'given information'
  • 'new information'
  • deaccenting
  • rhythm.

Conference name

Eurospeech 91: 2nd European conference on speech communication and technology

Conference date

1991-09-24

Status

Published