OUTPUT PROSODY—HOW INFORMATION HIGHLIGHTS ARE PIGGYBACKED BY DISCOURSE STRUCTURE

Our previous research has shown that global paragraph or discourse prosody reflects overall between-and cross-phrase association.This paper presents evidence of how in order to reflect additional features of information structure and speakers’intention while maintaining discourse coherence,additional focal information is layered over global prosody in the form of focus or accent and perceived as prominence.Read and spontaneous Mandarin speech data were analyzed to illustrate(1)how focus or prominence,manually tagged as perceived emphasis causes differences in global tempo patterns,(2)how perceived emphasis is conditioned by discourse genre,(3)which rhythm,pitch and intensity features are presented in marking of emphasis at the local phrase level as well as at higher discourse levels,(4)how the acoustic patterns present in the emphasized portions of output speech could be better analyzed to reveal the existence and influence of discourse structure,(5)how prosodic highlighting is achieved through creation of acoustic contrasts between prominent units and the units in their immediate neighborhood.We argue that degree of contrast corresponds positively to information weighting and perceptual saliency.Results show that placement of prosodic highlights is systematic,and that discourse coherence is always maintained.Planning of discourse structure as well as information structure is systematic but highly flexible within a system in which information weighting is realized by means of features in discourse prosody.