F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…

My dissertation undertakes a complete study of the stress patterns, syntactic construction, and rhetorical style of hypermetric verse in Germanic alliterative poetry. This project allows me to fill a gap in the study of Germanic meter while simultaneously investigating the connection between metrical and literary scholarship. Hypermetric meter…

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.…

The following three levels of intonation are described, and their relationship is discussed: 1) a concrete and atomistic level of the perceptually relevant pitch movements, 2) a concrete and global level of the audible pitch contours and the measurable fundamental frequency curves, and 3) an abstract and global level of intonation patterns.…

Discusses rules governing the intonation of French phrases and sentences. (Text is in French.) (RM)

Questions the thesis that the emphatic English "do" can only be analyzed in terms of discourse context, as opposed to sentence structure. (Text is in French.) (AM)

THE LANGUAGE OF THE HAUSA TRIBE AND A LINGUA FRANCA FOR MANY INHABITANTS OF NIGERIA'S NORTHERN REGION, HAUSA IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED TO BE THE MOST IMPORTANT LANGUAGE OF WEST AFRICA AND HAS MANY DIALECTS. THIS TEXT IS BASED ON THE KANO DIALECT AND IS INTENDED AS A PRELIMINARY STUDY TO A MORE THOROUGH ANALYSIS OF HAUSA MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND…

Phonological rules based on "stress-terminal pattern" (the principle that a phonological phrase has one primary stress and one terminal juncture requiring a mark of punctuation) can be used to improve punctuation in composition. These rules require that the writer be able to speak sentences at a normal pace with intonation appropriate to the…

A study of the relationship between intonation and syntax must consider communication as a whole, rather than isolated sentences. This study examines the role of the speakers in communication, bilateral and unilateral communication, and some pedagogical implications of this study. (Text is in French.) (AM)