Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

Argues that intonation is best analyzed as an overt marking of the focus structure of a sentence. The linguistic level of f-structure in which both topic and focus are identified provides the link between context, interpretation, syntax, and intonation. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the accentuation of two types of sentence in English: (1) straightforward intransitive sentences, and (2) intransitive sentences embedded in the frame "It's just NP noun phrase[ V verb[-ing." Modifications to Gussenhoven's (1983) Sentence Accent Assignment Rule (SAAR) are suggested based on large groups of exceptions of the SAAR.…

Claims that in metrical prose, rhythm can convey sense or express and underline what a writer is saying, and sound can be exploited to add a strong aural element that provides pleasure to the ears over and above the pleasure given by the sense of story. (SRT)

Discusses secondary stress in various types of words (e.g., in certain parts of speech, with certain spelling patterns, etc.) and in various kinds of sentences and communicative situations. (KM)

The language of sportscasting is analyzed in terms of register variation, first by locating the register by successive approximations to a characterization of occasions of use, then by identifying syntactic characteristics: simplification, inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions, and routines. Sports announcer talk is described as a…

Describes several experiments which examined the basic claims of metrical phonology. The first two experiments examined the possible influences of stress clash in speech timing. The third and fourth experiments tested Hayes's (1984) analysis rule of quadrisyllabic meter; the fifth experiment included a basic test of the stress clash notion. (SED)