Three Dimensions Of Sentence Prosody And Their (Non-)Interactions

Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information, including the type of speech act of an utterance (e.g., falling declarative vs. rising interrogative intonational tunes), the location of semantic focus (via prosodic prominence), and syntactic constituent structure (via prosodic phrasing). The syntactic/semantic functional dimensions (speech act, focus, constituency) are orthogonal to each other, but to which extent their prosodic correlates (tune, prominence, phrasing) are remains controversial. This paper takes a 'bottom up' approach to test for interactions, and reports evidence that contrary to many current theories of sentence intonation. the cues to the three dimensions are often orthogonal where interactions are predicted.