Abstract
The formal prosody grammar used for TTS focuses mainly on the description of final prosodic words in phrases/sentences which characterize a special prosodic phenomenon representing a certain communication function within the language system. This paper introduces an extension of the prosody model which also takes into account the importance and distinction of the first prosodic words in the prosodic phrases.
This phenomenon can not change the semantic interpretation of the phrase, but for higher naturalness, the beginnings of the prosodic phrases differ from subsequent words and should be, based on the phonetic background, dealt with separately.