Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications Athens, Greece September 18-20, 1997

Prosody and Discourse Structure: Issues and Experiments

Grzegorz Dogil, J. Kuhn, Jörg Mayer, Gregor Möhler, S. Rapp

University of Stuttgart, Institute of Natural Language Processing, Chair of Experimental Phonetics, Stuttgart, Germany

In this report we summarize the approach of examining structural relations between prosody and discourse semantics by means of experimental phonetics. We sketch the computational basis of the project, its methodological setting, and we present the results of three experiments on:

• the role of local prominence in disambiguation of focal adverbs
• the role of relative prominence in anaphora resolution
• the role of global prominence [register features] in discourse structure.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dogil, Grzegorz / Kuhn, J. / Mayer, Jörg / Möhler, Gregor / Rapp, S. (1997): "Prosody and discourse structure: issues and experiments", In INT-1997, 99-102.