Syllabus
notions of information structure focus-background given-new topic-comment prosody, intonation word stress, phrase stress, utterance-level stress phonetic correlates of phonological stress/accent deaccenting boundary tones
ToBI prosodic encoding of focus new focus contrastive focus prosodic encoding of givenness discourse givenness other types of givenness prosodic encoding of topic plain topic contrastive topic
Annotation
This seminar is concerned with the prosodic encoding of information structure in English and possibly in other languages (depending on the interest of the students). Three key information-structural oppositions will be considered: focus-background, given-new, and topic-comment.
It is commonly assumed (and experimentally confirmed) that focused constituents attract sentence stress and given ones avoid it. While there is arguably no dedicated prosodic encoding of plain (abboutness) topics, there is a special prosodic contour encoding the so-called contrastive topic.
The relation between prosody and word order will also be discussed. After laying out the theoretical background (concerning information structure, prosody, and their mutual relationship), we will concentrate on empirical studies (experimental or corpus-based) which address specific issues relevant to the topic of the seminar.
The seminar will be of interest to anybody interested in information structure, discourse pragmatics, sentence prosody and intonation, syntax and semantics, and empirical methods in linguistics.
