The Information structure-prosody interface revisited

Abstract

Several grammar theories relate information structure and prosody, highlighting a major correspondence between theme and rheme, and intonation patterns. Although these theories have been successfully exploited in some specific speech synthesis applications, they are mainly based on short default-order sentences, which limits their expressiveness for real discourse with longer sentences and complex structures. This paper revises/nthese theories, identifying cases in which they are valid, and providing a new proposal for cases in which a more complex model is needed. Specifically, our experiments performed on real discourse from the Wall Street Journal corpus show that we need a model that: (1) foresees a hierarchical theme/rheme structure, and (2) introduces, apart from the traditional theme and rheme, a new element—the specifier.