SHORT REPORT The Prosodic Phrasing of Clause-Final

SHORT REPORT The Prosodic Phrasing of Clause-Final Prepositional Phrases EILEEN FITZPATRICK Montclair State University Spoken language is not produced in a continuous flow; it is broken up into phrases. An understanding of phrase-boundary placement is critical for comprehension and of great importance in text-to-speech technology. The knowledge that speakers use to determine phrasal boundaries has been attributed in the literature to many seemingly competing factors, syntactic, semantic, phonological, discourse, and pragmatic. This article reports on a study of the boundaries of a single type of data, clause-final prepositional phrases (PPs). The study was done to improve the phrasing of a text-to-speech synthesizer. The syntactic constituency of the PP and its length as measured in accented syllables account for an overwhelming majority of the data. The few exceptions to this account fall into natural categories of semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, which suggests they have the status of marked forms.*

1. THE PROBLEM. The domain over which an intonation contour extends is crucial to the communication of the intended meaning of an utterance, as example 1 illustrates. (1) After he ate my cat Freddy took a nap. If the first domain in 1 extends over after he ate, then the cat is the diner, but if it extends over after he ate my cat, then the cat is the dinner. Typically, a speaker indicates the boundary of an intonation domain with a pause, a pitch perturbation and/or syllable lengthening. A writer would indicate the boundary in 1 with a comma, but punctuation does not always indicate the end of a contour. No punctuation, for example, indicates that 2 is normally spoken with a boundary after well. (2) Waiters who remember well serve orders correctly. The knowledge that speakers and readers use to determine intonation contour boundaries has been characterized in the linguistic literature as ‘not well understood’ (Selkirk 1995) and ‘notoriously elusive’ (Ladd 1996), chiefly because so many seemingly competing factors have been adduced as correlates of intonation phrase boundaries. Since phrase boundaries aid comprehension, text-to-speech (tts) systems attempt to mark these boundaries by inserting pauses as well as changes in segment duration and pitch. But because of a poor understanding of boundary placement, tts systems lack principle-based prosodic boundary rules,1 which gives these systems their run-on delivery and contributes to their artificial quality. However, since most tts synthesizers allow boundary markers to be inserted either by hand or by rule, these systems provide a good means of explicitly testing the aspects of the knowledge of the speaker/reader that contribute to prosodic phrasing. At the risk of being one more blind man putting a hand to the elephant, our group at Bell Labs tested several hypotheses about the determinants of the prosodic phrase by building rules based on Gee and Grosjean’s (1983) prosodic phrase model into a * This work was carried out while the author was associated with AT&T Bell Laboratories. I would like to acknowledge Joan Bachenko, the principal investigator of the larger project of which the work described here was a part. I am grateful to Joan Bachenko, Alice Greenwood, and Chilin Shih for many fruitful discussions and suggestions and to Language referees and editors for their comments and advice and for helping to give a linguistic orientation to this work. All errors are my own. 1

Stochastic systems that estimate the likelihood of a prosodic break based on a training corpus of handtagged text do exist. See, for example, Wang & Hirschberg 1992 and Sanders & Taylor 1995. 544

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tts system and seeing where the system performed incorrectly.2 If we could identify where the rules rendered inappropriate phrasing, we could improve the system and perhaps shed more light on the nature of prosodic phrasing. One of the interesting places where our system performed poorly was in rendering pauses around clause-final constituents. For example, it generated an unnatural period of silence before the italicized phrase in 3. (3) The speaker pronounced the names of the characters on the left. This inappropriate phrasing indicated a circumscribed problem to solve and an opportunity to examine the proposed linguistic correlates of prosodic phrasing. In an effort to render clause-final constituents correctly, we examined the prosodic phrasing of clausefinal prepositional phrases (PPs) in a self-contained corpus. This article discusses the results of that investigation and, in particular, the contribution of phrasal length based on accented syllable count that characterizes most of the data.3 This work is intended as an empirical study, one that can form the foundation for further theoretical development. 2. THE STUDY. The study of prepositional phrases grew out of tests on an experimental system (Bachenko et al. 1986) to determine phrase-level prosody for textual input to the Olive-Liberman text-to-speech synthesizer (Olive & Liberman 1985). The original system, following Gee and Grosjean’s psycholinguistic model based on experimental data, used information about syntactic constituency, predicate-argument relations, adjacency to a verb, and constituent length to break textual sentences into spoken phrases. While the system produced significant improvement in prosodic quality when both its parser (Hindle 1983) and prosodic component returned acceptable results, there were three types of error that consistently caused problems. One of these error types involved the treatment of clause-final constituents that are not adjacent to a verb.4 The system assigned a relative weight to the boundaries between phrases in a left-to-right manner. Thus clause-final constituents, if not subsumed by the prosodic verb rule (see n. 4), received the highest boundary strength values in a sentence. In sentences with several prosodic phrases, a high boundary value converted to a primary phrase boundary, which set the final constituent off from the rest of the sentence in a manner that excluded the reading of this constituent as a modifier of the nearest branching node. This phenomenon is illustrated in 4, where the synthetically generated pause before the final constituent is indicated with a double bar.5 (4) a. The speaker pronounced the names of the characters 㛳 on the left. b. The experimenters instructed the informants to speak 㛳 naturally. c. In other words, we had to restore the home market 㛳 in some degree. d. That a solution couldn’t be found seemed quite clear 㛳 to them. e. John asked the strange young man to be quick 㛳 on the task. 2 3

The group consisted of Joan Bachenko, John Lacy, C. E. Wright, and me.

The term ACCENT is used here to refer to the prominence placed on certain syllables in the data. The other two error types were caused by the recognition of the S(entence) boundary node as a prosodic boundary, which gives an unacceptable result in sentences like Even my fiance´ believes 㛳 it’s only my imagination and a differentiation of verb complements and adjuncts, which gave results like Seven of our porters were killed 㛳 in the fall. Clause-final constituents that are adjacent to a verb are subject to a verb balancing rule (Gee & Grosjean 1983:442) which groups the verb head and any encliticized auxiliaries with the phrase that precedes it if the verb plus this phrase have fewer words than the phrase that follows the verb. 5 Primary phrase boundaries are marked throughout with a double vertical bar, secondary phrase boundaries with a single bar. In this study, the most salient characteristic of a primary phrase boundary was a pause, while that of the secondary boundary involved a change in pitch. 4

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In an effort to discover when it is appropriate to prosodically set off clause-final constituents, I examined the prosodic phrasing of prepositional phrases (PPs) occurring in a self-contained corpus. I chose PPs mainly because they are often found in the position that was identified as problematic and also because the left edge of the PP, usually a preposition, is easily identifiable. The prepositions that marked the left edge of the PPs are shown in 5. (5) about, above, after, against, among, as, as to, at, before, below, beside, between, by, down, for, from, in, into, next to, of, off, on, onto, over, past, round, since, than, through, to (infinitives were omitted), under, up, upon, with, without While infinitives were omitted because they were involved in Gee and Grosjean’s verb rule (see n. 4), subordinate clauses like before she died were included in the data because a preposition marks their left edge.6 The corpus was a professional dramatic reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band.7 The choice of a corpus raises the question of what we hoped to model for the tts system. Clearly, we were not modeling ordinary speech, even ordinary read speech, with its stammers and hesitations. A professional reader would not utter the prosodic phrasing in 4 that an ordinary speaker, short of breath, might deliver.8 A tts system aims to maximize listener comprehension and professionally read speech is an idealized model that is optimized for comprehension. Also, the slower speaking rate of professionally read speech is more likely to have more pausing, which is the phenomenon we wanted to examine. Prior to this study, Joan Bachenko and I had listened to the reading and, independent of each other, had transcribed it according to our perceptions of prosodic phrasing. Both of us had perceived three types of prosodic event: a primary phrase boundary, a secondary phrase boundary, and the absence of a boundary. Each of us had distinguished a primary phrase boundary by a perceived pause and secondary boundaries by a pitch change but no pause. In order to get a clean contrast between PPs that were clearly set off and those that were not set off at all, we discarded PPs that we had perceived as being set off by a secondary phrase boundary, as well as PPs that were adjacent to a verb, since we assumed these were subject to some form of the verb rule. We were thus comparing two types of clause-final PP not adjacent to a verb: those that were set off by a pause and those that were not set off at all, either by pausing or pitch change. The exclusions left 133 unique PPs to consider. While this initial experiment uses the judgment of only two listeners, the number of PPs and the consistency of our agreement about their prosodic phrase boundaries,9 as well as the clear grouping of the data, give substantial

6

The PPs found in the corpus are posted at http://www.chss.montclair.edu/linguistics/pp.htm. The reading is on audiotape from Audio Library Classics. The major speaking roles are performed by Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, and an unidentified female reader. 8 A professional speaker might distort the phrasing for dramatic advantage. This would show up in the data as prosodic phrase aberrations due to contrastive accent and unusual pausing. While §5 discusses data of this type, the PP data in fact showed a remarkable consistency of phrasing in terms of syntactic constituency and phrasal length. 7

9

De Pijper and Sanderman (1995) report consistent inter-transcriber agreement on prosodic boundary placement and value even when the segmental content of the speech is unintelligible.

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support to the results. Further evidence that this preliminary study is on the right track comes from the natural classes into which apparent counterexamples fall. 3. PROPOSED CORRELATES OF PROSODIC PHRASING. Prosodic phrasing is widely assumed to divide the flow of speech into chunks that facilitate processing. Yet this performance task often correlates with one or more linguistic factors, making it a ripe area of research for both psychologists and linguists. This section introduces two correlates, syntactic constituent structure and constituent length, that were found to play a large role in the distribution of the PP data, and briefly covers the other factors that affect the distribution of the data. 3.1. SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE. As in ex. 1, a string of words dominated by the same syntactic node tends to cohere more closely in speech than a string dominated by two different nodes. Bierwisch (1966) showed that a pause could optionally be introduced in German at any ‘major’ constituent break within the sentence. Lehiste et al. (1976) found that the durational differences characteristic of prosodic phrasing can disambiguate syntactically ambiguous phrases like old men and women. These observations have led some researchers, e.g. Cooper and Paccia-Cooper (1980) and Kaisse (1985), to claim that syntax provides domains for phonological rules (including prosodic rules) in a direct fashion. The data in 4, however, with their mix of complements and modifiers, indicated that constituent structure alone could not correctly predict phrase boundary placement. Our tts system problem was consonant with well-known cases of misalignment between the prosodic phrase and the syntactic phrase. One such case involves the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses, which is lost if all clause boundaries are assumed to mark a prosodic phrase boundary. The setting off of all embedded sentences, including restrictive relatives, would render sentences like 6a unintelligible because the pause before and after the clause (the so-called comma intonation) forces a nonrestrictive reading on a clause that is meant to restrict the subject. (6) a. *The Adam Smith 㛳 who wrote The Wealth of Nations 㛳 never appeared on PBS. b. The Adam Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations 㛳 never appeared on PBS. Certain syntactic constructions, including preposed clauses as in 1, nonrestrictive relative clauses, parentheticals, vocatives, and appositives consistently occur in separate prosodic phrases. But examples like 6 show that assuming an isomorphic relation between syntactic structure and prosodic boundaries is problematic. These problems have led to other accounts of the misalignments, which diminish the role of syntax in prosodic phrasing. These accounts assume that other factors, including constituent length, as well as phonological, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic correlates, overlay the syntax and provide an explanation of the syntactic/prosodic mismatches. 3.2. LENGTH. The length, or heaviness, of a constituent plays a role in both syntax and prosody. The direct object in 7, for example, can occur at the end of the sentence only if it is heavy. (7) a. They attributed the painting to Masaccio. b. *They attributed to Masaccio the painting. c. They attributed to Masaccio the painting on the chapel wall. The literature is less clear, however, on how length is measured and on whether length correlates with rhythm and timing or with semantic import.

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Most work on constituent length acknowledges its role in phrasing without specifying the unit of measurement of length. Bing (1985), for example, observes that constituents that refer to items newly introduced into a discourse tend to be longer, but specifies no unit of length. Similarly, Nespor and Vogel (1986) note that ‘‘there is a tendency to establish Is [intonational phrases] of a more or less uniform, ‘‘average’’ length, although at this point we are not able to characterize this ideal length more precisely’ (194). In work that measures length, various units have been proposed. Bierwisch (1966) establishes prosodic boundaries that take the number of syllables in a phrase into account. Bierwisch’s rules erase prosodic boundaries with the proviso that if there are more than two syllables or more than one accented syllable in two consecutive phrases, the boundary between the phrases must be preserved. Rice (1987) also cites the syllable as the appropriate measure of length. LOW TONE INSERTION (LTI), which indicates prosodic phrase-final position in Slave, fails to apply when a single-syllable word is in the environment for the rule. In contrast, LTI almost always applies with a word of three or more syllables, and varies in application with a two-syllable word. Gee and Grosjean (1983) define length in terms of syntactic branching nodes, where each word (either function or content word) triggers a branch. Their VERB BALANCING RULE groups the verb head and any encliticized auxiliaries with the phrase that precedes it if the verb and this phrase have fewer words than the phrase that follows the verb (see below). Finally, Zec and Inkelas (1990) and Inkelas and Zec (1995) claim that a prosodic constituent is heavy if and only if it branches, with branching being that of prosodic (not syntactic) structure, and where each phonological word constitutes a branch of a constituent. If the phonological word is defined in terms of the accented syllable, then this definition of heaviness is equivalent to Bierwisch’s.10 The study of rhythm and timing in speech led psycholinguists to an exploration of the balancing of phrases based on length. Work on spoken subject-verb-object patterns (e.g. Martin 1970, Allen 1975, Grosjean & Collins 1979) observed that speakers did not automatically group a verb with its object, as a syntactic approach would predict, but that in many cases an (SV)O grouping occurred, and that in these cases the subject was shorter than the object. This length-based phrasing contrast is illustrated by Martin’s examples, given here as 8. (8) a. Waiters who remember well 㛳 serve orders correctly. b. Chickens were eating 㛳 the remaining green vegetables. This variation in phrasing around the verb led Gee and Grosjean to claim that ‘given its pivotal role, the verb is fairly free to reflect rhythmical factors’ (1983:446), which they acknowledge with their verb balancing rule. For the psycholinguists, then, it is not an inherent notion of phrase length that is important, but a notion of the balancing of elements to yield phrases of approximately equal length that allows an utterance to conform to a rhythmic pattern that facilitates processing. Martin (1972) observes that rhythmic patterns, in which some elements are distinguished from others, facilitate the encoding of linguistic information into the signal by the speaker and the decoding of that information out of the signal by the listener. Since accented syllables are articulated 10 Zec and Inkelas do not define the notion of phonological word, but their Serbo-Croatian examples of prosodic branching—[taj][covek] ‘that man’ and [Rio][de Zaniero]—would indicate that the phonological word includes the lexical word with main stress and the clitics that precede or follow it.

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at the expense of unaccented syllables, their occurrence in a rhythmic pattern enables the listener to anticipate the location of the important information.11 This notion of a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables is captured phonologically in the metrical grid representation of Liberman 1975 and Liberman & Prince 1977. Opposed to the notion that rhythmic considerations determine prosodic phrase length is the notion of a correlation between length and semantic import, with high-content items being set off in separate phrases. Bing connects the notion of semantic weight with phrasing, noting that semantically richer examples tend to be longer and, because of their length, tend to form a separate phrase (1985:136). According to Chafe, this tendency is due to a cognitive consideration: substantive intonation units ‘are fairly strongly constrained to a modal length of four words in English, a fact that suggests a cognitive constraint on how much information can be fully active in the mind at one time’ (1994:69). Bolinger, however, attributes the comparative length of semantically richer items to the ‘historical attrition’ of low-content words like pronouns rather than to a correlation between length and content (1972:634). Jun (1993) also argues that semantic weight functions independent of length in determining prosodic boundaries in Korean, with words of comparable length but different semantic weight behaving differently in terms of prosodic phrasing. These two questions, on the unit of length and the appropriate correlate of length, are related. If the appropriate unit of length is the word, then the determinant of what is long could be either a semantic or a phonological phenomenon, since both components deal with the notion of word at some level. However if the appropriate unit of length is the syllable, then the correlate of length has to be a phonological phenomenon, since the syllable is an exclusively phonological notion. 3.3. OTHER CORRELATES OF PROSODIC PHRASING. The literature on prosodic phrasing cites several other factors as either affecting or determining phrasing; these include semantic, discourse, and pragmatic factors. Semantic factors considered to correlate with phrasing include the argument structure of the sentence (Crystal 1969, Selkirk 1984) and the major semantic constituents assumed to define accent placement (Ladd 1983, Gussenhoven 1984). Discourse has been observed to affect phrasing when involving the contrast of new versus given information (Bing 1985, Chafe 1994) and the contrast of discourse cues versus denotative lexical uses of now, well, and so on (Hirschberg & Litman 1987, Litman & Hirschberg 1990). Pragmatic intent has been claimed to influence phrasing in a speaker’s setting off of ‘more colorful’ items in separate prosodic phrases (Bolinger 1989) and in the setting off of items that are contrastively stressed (Bolinger 1961). That so many factors have been claimed to affect prosodic phrasing raises a number of questions. The overarching question is whether there is a basic factor on which the others are overlaid. As a working hypothesis for the present study we accepted the syntactic structure as basic12 by defining the domain to be examined as the syntactic 11

Nespor and Vogel also acknowledge ‘some more abstract notion of length in terms of timing or rhythm’ (195), which they see as connected to the claim that the length of an utterance is a function of speech rate—the slower the rate of speech the longer the phrase. 12 The system described in Bachenko & Fitzpatrick 1990 assumed a full-blown syntactic parse although subsequent versions of the system (Fitzpatrick & Bachenko 1989, Bachenko et al. 1995) use only information about lexical heads and their dependents since the higher level nodes proved irrelevant in rendering the phrasing.

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category PP. Even Bolinger, who argues against regarding syntax as basic to phrasing, acknowledges in practice the existence of a clitic grouping of function words with their related head, so that the rendering of Harvard as a separate phrase in his example given here as 9 would be extremely unusual. (9) The girl even took classes at Harvard. Of course the study could show that the prepositional edge of the PP was irrelevant in defining the domain of the prosodic phrase. The PP data show all but the argument structure of the sentence playing some role in the phrasing. Given this melange of factors, how do the factors relate to each other? In other words, with respect to our tts system, will the PP data inform a model of prosodic phrasing for clause-final constituents? 4. THE PATTERN OF PP PHRASING IN THE DATA. Of the 133 clause-final PPs that occurred in the data with either a primary phrase boundary or no boundary, 62 occurred with no pause before the prepositional edge of the PP and 71 with a pause. What differences between these two sets of data might correlate with the presence or absence of a pause? Each of the correlates offered by the literature on prosodic phrasing was considered. Admittedly, though, discrete correlates that could be programmed into a tts system—syntactic structure, syntactic length in terms of branching, phonological length in terms of syllables, and the possible pivotal role of the preposition—were given priority. The data were classified by presence or absence of a prosodic phrase boundary before the PP, and further by the notion of length discussed below. 4.1. SYNTACTIC CONSTITUENCY. The syntactic influence on the phrasing of the PPs is, for the most part, straightforward: a prosodic boundary is realized before the preposition if the PP is long, otherwise not. However, several more complex examples indicate the significant input of syntactic constituent structure. These data consist of PPs in which the preposition is not the syntactic left edge of the PP. They include the following examples, where the relevant preposition appears in capitals.13 ´ VE the lı´ttle o´pening (10) a. up there 㛳 just ABO ´ FTER noón. b. 㛳 SHO´RTLY A ´ RE my sı´ster’s deáth. c. 㛳 a couple of years ago 㛳 ju´st BEFO d. Let us thrust | this creature 㛳 baćk ÍNTO its deń. ´ UGH the veńtila´tor e. drove the brute 㛳 baćk THRO In 10a–c, the item immediately preceding the preposition functions as a modifier of the preposition, so the prosodic break before this modifier keeps the syntactic constituent intact. The same can be said of 10d–e if back is analyzed as a specifier of the preposition (Baltin 1978).14 Conformance to syntactic constituency also accounts for the data in 11 under the assumption that the function words but and and are cliticized to the PP and therefore spoken in the same phrase as the PP. (11) a. 㛳 but ju´st AS PLAÍNLY fu´rnished. b. 㛳 were empty 㛳 and IN POÓR repaír. The syntactic influence on the phrasing data is therefore more than happenstance. A phrasing that separated the modifier from the preposition in 10d–e would give back 13 14

An accent mark indicates accent or prominence on the syllable. Small capitals indicate contrastive stress.

If back is analyzed as an intransitive preposition, as in Emonds 1976, then, of course, the preposition itself is functioning as the left edge of both the PP and the prosodic phrase.

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a different interpretation as a modifier of the verb and the same phrasing for 10a–c would be unintelligible. 4.2. THE PREPOSITION AS A POSSIBLE PIVOT. The work on length and rhythm cited above argues for the pivotal role of the verb in the rhythm of the sentence. Given their shared status as ⳮN/ⳭV phrasal heads, it is possible that both verbs and prepositions act as pivots that balance the phrases on either side of the head. But it is immediately clear from the data that prepositions do not behave the way verbs do in grouping with the material before or after the verb. There is only one instance comparable to 8b in which the preposition patterns with the material preceding it: He’s a collector of 㛳 strańge ańimals. And even this example is not truly comparable to 8b since the phrasing here is affected by the contrastive stress on strange, as discussed below. Nevertheless, the distribution of PPs between those that are part of a previous phrase and those that are not is so similar that it is worthwhile to look at whether the length of the prosodic phrase preceding the PP plays a role in the phrasing of the PP. Table 1, for which the analysis assumes Gee and Grosjean’s definition of length in terms of word count, shows that the presence or absence of a pause before a PP appears to occur randomly with respect to the length of the previous phrase. PRECEDING PHRASE IS

NO PAUSE PRECEDES PP

PAUSE PRECEDES PP

same length as PP shorter than PP longer than PP

13 11 7 12 42 48 TOTAL 62 71 TABLE 1. Phrasing of PP as a function of balancing with preceding phrase. (Length is calculated as word count.)

4.3. LENGTH OF THE PP. The prepositional phrase data indicate that length of the PP plays an important role in determining whether or not the PP occurs as a separate prosodic phrase. This section considers the possible units of measurement that might define length in the data, looking for the measure of length that shows the maximum correlation between the length of the PP and its prosodic phrasing. With length measured by word count, the 133 PPs in the study show the distribution given in Table 2 with respect to prosodic phrasing. WORDS IN PP


PAUSE PRECEDES PP

1 2 3 4 5 6

1 35 21 2 2 1

0 3 25 19 21 3

TABLE 2. Distribution of prosodic phrasing as a function of PP word count.

This distribution suggests that length of the PP plays a role in determining the prosodic phrasing of clause-final PPs since, in general, the greater the number of words the more likely it is that a pause will precede the PP. However, at three words per phrase, the data are nondecisive: 21 PPs are not set off while 25 are. Syllable count as the measure of length shows more of a correlation between the length of the PP and its prosodic phrasing, as seen in Table 3. This distribution says that at three or fewer syllables it is highly likely that a PP will not be preceded by a pause, while at five syllables it is highly likely that it will be preceded by a pause.

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PAUSE PRECEDES PP

2 22 2 3 22 4 4 7 10 5 8 23 6 2 12 7 0 15 8 0 1 9 0 3 10 1 0 3. Distribution of prosodic phrasing as a function of PP syllable count.

Nevertheless, there are 26 cases where this is not true and there is also a distribution at four syllables that is nondecisive. The four-syllable PP data reveal an empirical difference between the cases that are not preceded by a pause and those that are. The data that are not preceded by a pause are given in 12; those that are preceded by a pause are given in 13. (12) a. 㛳 had been noto´rious IN the coúnty 㛳 b. | from o´ver the´re IN the vı´llage 㛳 c. 㛳 for feár OF the cheétah 㛳 d. | o´pen the shu´tters OF your wıńdow 㛳 e. 㛳 at the co´rner OF the ceíling. f. 㛳 were empty 㛳 and IN POÓR repaír. g. 㛳 on preteńse OF a heádaćhe 㛳 ´ S to de´tails. (13) a. 㛳 please be precise 㛳 A b. | with his cane 㛳 AT the be´llpu´ll. ´ RE she dıéd | c. | the ONE thing 㛳 BEFO d. 㛳 through a hole 㛳 IN the pa´rk wa´ll. e. 㛳 passed at once 㛳 IŃTO the roóm 㛳 f. 㛳 to ask the advice 㛳 OF She´rlock Ho´lmes. g. 㛳 so as to make a LOOP 㛳 OF the whı´pco´rd. h. 㛳 of the INHABITED wing 㛳 OF Sto´ke Mo´ran | i. 㛳 shone out from the darkness 㛳 OF the we´st wıńg. j. 㛳 which threw itself on the grass 㛳 WITH WRI´THING lı´mbs 㛳 The PPs in 13 are crucially longer than those in 12 in one sense: they have more than one accented syllable, which gives extra length to the phrase.15 These data suggest that, following Bierwisch’s account of German phrasing (1966), it is accented syllable count that is decisive for prosodic phrasing. Another set of PP data supports the notion that length be defined in terms of the accented syllable. The PPs in 14, when measured by word count or syllable count, are short; nevertheless they are each spoken as a separate phrase. However, in 14a–b both the preposition and the relative pronoun are spoken in their stressed form by the reader (the preposition is spoken with contrastive stress) and in 14c the possessive adjective is spoken with contrastive stress. Thus in these examples a ‘short’ PP is rendered long by the addition of a second accented syllable. 15 There are two exceptions to this statement: 12f, which, as discussed above, is a PP within a larger conjoined phrase, and 12g, discussed below, in which the PP serves as the complement of a larger syntactic phrase.

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(14) a. 㛳 led into the whitewashed corridor 㛳 FRO´M whıćh 㛳 the three bedrooms opened. b. | at the village inn 㛳 FRO´M whıćh 㛳 we could COMMAND a view 㛳 c. | must spend the night HERE 㛳 IN YOÚR roóm. The opposite effect occurs in 15, where the British pronunciation of medicine as [mε´ dsn ] gives the PP of medicine only one accented syllable. (15) My name is John H. Watson 㛳 and by´ profe´ssion I am a doćtor OF me´dicine. The majority of the PP data supports the claim that the presence of multiple accented syllables in the PP correlates with a prosodic break before the PP. PPs with more than one accented syllable are consistently spoken in a separate prosodic phrase, while PPs with a single accented syllable are not prosodically separated from the preceding phrase. There are three PPs in the data that pose a particular problem for the accented syllable account of length. These PPs, shown in 16, contain two accented syllables but are not set off by a prosodic break preceding the PP. (16) a. 㛳 and then ran | swı´ftly ÍNTO the da´rkness. ´ VER the esta´te | b. | which 㛳 WAŃDER freély O c. 㛳 so that it must ALWAYS be in the SAME position | re´lative TO the veńtila´tor | Examples 16a–b are both cases of an -ly adverb modifying a verb and followed by a PP with two accented syllables. Both the syntactic structure involved here and the length of the PP would lead one to expect a prosodic break before the PP, and in fact the other occurrences of this construction, given in 17, show a minor phrase break between the adverbial modifier and the PP. ´ R yoú (17) a. I’ve been waiting | so eágerly | FO b. that it’s likely to weigh | very heávily | ON my cońscience ´ UND his heád c. which seem to be bound | tı´ghtly | RO d. then I sleep | more heávily | THAN yoú do´ e. and was lashing 㛳 FU´RIOUSLY | WITH his cańe I cannot explain why 16a, as spoken on the tape, does not fit this pattern. Equally puzzling is 16b where no break occurs either before or after the modifier. Since the readings of 16a–b are not what would be expected, I gave these and similar sentences to four speakers who read the sentences out of context. All four speakers put the PPs in 16a and 16b in a separate prosodic phrase, either through pitch modulation or through pausing and its concomitant pitch and timing changes, which indicates that the expected phrasing of these sentences is as predicted and that the phrasing on the original professional tape was influenced by some discourse or performance factor that is not apparent to me. The remaining problematic datum for the accented syllable account of length is the PP to the ventilator in 16c, given within the sentence in which it occurs in 18. (18) It was CLAMPED to the FLOOR 㛳 so that it must ALWAYS be in the SAME position | re´lative TO the veńtila´tor | and the be´llro´pe. Since ventilator has accents on ven and la, the accented syllable account predicts that the PP in which it occurs should form a separate prosodic phrase, but it does not. Furthermore, there is no other possible phrasing for this PP. The phrasing in 18 appears to have something to do with the postposing of the adjective phrase (cf. the same relative position) due to the presence of the adjective complement. Other examples of

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this phenomenon are equally resistant to a prosodic break before the PP complement, no matter how long the complement. (19) a. Here is a man proud (*㛳) of his many accomplishments. b. We took the path parallel (*㛳) to the garden wall. c. She is a person ready (*㛳) for any challenge. There is clearly some characterizable property of this type of adjective phrase that forces its prosodic closeness to the following PP, making it exceptional with respect to the accent account of length. Since this is the only datum in the corpus that represents this construction, however, it is difficult to speculate on its exceptionality. The correlation between prosodic phrasing and accented syllable count is given in Table 4. ACCENTED SYLLS IN PP


PAUSE PRECEDES PP

0 1 2 3 4 5

1 48 12 1 0 0

0 3 49 15 3 1

TABLE 4. Distribution of prosodic phrasing as a function of PP accented syllable count.

Table 4 shows a bifurcation of the data into PPs preceded and not preceded by a pause on the basis of number of accented syllables in the PP. There is a clear generalization that can be gleaned from Table 4: clause-final PPs with two or more accented syllables are preceded by a pause while those with less than two accented syllables are not. The exceptions to this generalization—three short PPs that are preceded by a pause and thirteen long PPs that are not—are almost all characterized by syntactic, semantic, discourse, or pragmatic features that account for the exceptional status of these phrasings, as discussed below. Given evidence for a unit of length measurement, it is possible to consider the question of whether rhythmic considerations or semantic richness determine the length of the prosodic phrase. The fact that the phonological notions of syllable, accented syllable, and a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables are determining the length of the phrase indicates that the length of the phrase is being determined by rhythmic rather than semantic considerations. Many of the rather semantically vacuous long PPs in the data also suggest that long PPs are not necessarily semantically rich. The semantically vacuous long PPs include those in 20. ´ FTER noón. (20) a. 㛳 but I shall be home 㛳 SHO´RTLY A b. Pending | the alterations 㛳 AS I uńderstańd. ´ S to c. The circumstances | of your sister’s death 㛳 please be precise 㛳 A de´tails. d. 㛳 and follow my advice 㛳 IN e´very respećt. A final observation about the data distribution in Table 4: the bifurcation of the data that results from the accented syllable account of length makes length look like a competence issue wherein the speaker has a basic knowledge of phrasing to which exceptions may apply. The distribution in Table 4 thus prompts consideration of whether markedness is involved in prosodic phrasing, with the exceptions to the length account of PP phrasing being marked forms. The notion that rhythm and timing play a role in speech that is intimately connected with pausing contributes to this suggestion. If the occurrence of accented syllables at equally timed intervals facilitates both production

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and perception, as Martin (1972) claims, some version of the pausing-timing hypothesis as a universal characteristic of speech would be expected.16 In addition, most of the PP data that do not conform to the length constraint are exceptional for clear reasons that characterize them as more complex forms, supporting the notion of a marked status for these data. Most of them fall into natural classes that would lead us to expect their exceptional status with respect to the length/phrasing correlation. 5. MARKED PHRASING. The accented syllable account of PP phrasing results in 16 exceptions out of 133 prepositional phrases. These exceptions are treated below in light of the approaches to prosodic phrasing considered in §3. The existence of a substantive reason for most exceptions points to the character of the exceptional data as marked. 5.1. SYNTACTIC EXCEPTIONS. In addition to the interplay of syntactic constituency and length in determining the majority of the phrasing in the data, syntactic considerations appear to play a role in some of the exceptions to this interplay. In particular, the data contain exceptions that can be accounted for by appeal to the syntactic notion of complement embedding. Complement embedding, as exemplified in 21, appears to figure indirectly in the determination of the length of a phrase. (21) a. | any pressing NEED 㛳 FOR repaírs | to tha´t eńd wa´ll. b. 㛳 WITH a provı´sion | that a ce´rtain ańnual su´m | While the phonological phrase that begins the PP in 21a–b is short with respect to accented syllable count, the complete syntactic PP, FOR repairs to that end wall and WITH a provision that a certain annual sum, is long, which may account for the fact that the entire PP is prosodically set off. The pattern in the data consistently exhibits a break before the initial preposition, whether or not the embedded PP constitutes a separate prosodic phrase, as 22 illustrates. (22) a. 㛳 a´fter your retu´rn TO Eńgland. b. | as if a ma´ss of me´tal | c. 㛳 AT the co´rner of the ceíling. d. 㛳 FOR feár of the cheétah 㛳 e. | for the tı´me OF yeár. f. 㛳 IN the sı´lence of the nı´ght 㛳 g. | of a bı´rd OF the nı´ght 㛳 h. | OF STRAŃGE pe´ts | FROM Ińdia. i. 㛳 on preteńse OF a heádaćhe 㛳 j. | ON the co´rner | of the ta´ble ´ UGH a ho´le 㛳 in the pa´rk wa´ll. k. 㛳 THRO ´ UT the kno´wledge | of your ste´pfa´ther. l. 㛳 WITHO 16 Martin argues against the classification of languages into ‘stress timed’ (equal-interval stress) and ‘syllable timed’ (equal length syllables). He views so-called syllable-timed languages like Spanish as having fewer unstressed syllables between stressed syllables ‘hence requiring less interval subdivision and resulting in the impression of evenly spaced syllables and less prominent stress at the same time.’ Selkirk’s notion of a silent beat separating multiple stresses offers a mechanism for representing this characteristic. Selkirk claims that ‘the limits of intonational phrases often coincide with substantial pauses, which our theory represents as silent positions in the metrical grid’ (1984:28). These silent positions are phonetically unfilled beats in the metrical grid that account for, among other things, rhythm and timing effects in the utterance such as the contrast between Marce´l proved and Ma´rcel Proúst. The stress clash of Marcel and Proust is resolved by the rhythm rule, which moves the primary stress forward in Marcel, while the clash of Marcel and proved is resolved by a silent beat before the verb.

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There appears to be an interesting preplanning going on with these complements. In pausing before beginning the PP, the speaker is preparing the listener for the full complement. This is an inherent aspect of the rhythmic concept which claims that the ‘total array of time-varying cues in the continuous flow of speech will project ahead the general outline of the remaining prosodic contour’ (Martin 1972:503). 5.2. SEMANTIC CORRELATES OF PHRASING IN THE DATA. Predicate-argument relations appear not to play a role in the phrasing of the corpus examined here, but accent placement, defined in terms of major semantic constituents within a focus domain, does. The hypothesis that immediate constituents of an intonational phrase must be related as head-modifier or head-argument does not hold consistently in the data in 23. Several of the PPs bear no clear relation to a grammatical head in the rest of the prosodic phrase, yet they occur in the same phrase. (23) a. 㛳 he MUST be asleep BY no´w. b. | of one of the OLDEST families IN England 㛳 c. 㛳 had been notorious IN the coúnty 㛳 d. by becoming | dreadfully feared IN the vı´llage. e. 㛳 a SINGLE bright light 㛳 shone out from the darkness 㛳 Conversely, there are data in which the noun head and its PP argument/modifier occur in separate phrases, as in 24. (24) a. 㛳 to ask the advice 㛳 OF She´rlock Ho´lmes. b. 㛳 we could COMMAND a view 㛳 of the INHABITED wing 㛳 c. 㛳 from her allusion 㛳 TO the spećkled bańd. While argument structure does not play a role in the PP data, accent placement, as defined in terms of major semantic constituents within a ‘focus domain’ (Ladd 1983, Gussenhoven 1984) does. Domain-assignment rules allow constituents to merge prosodically depending on focus. The head of a partitive construction such as one in one of the men is one such merged constituent, which accounts for the simple prosodic phrase containing one in 25. (25) a. | who is the last survivor | of ońe of the O´LDEST fa´milies IN Eńgland 㛳 b. 㛳 in ońe OF the sı´tting roóms. The absence of a break here contrasts nicely with what appears to be the default Noun Ⳮ PP phrasing in, for example, shone out from the darkness 㛳 OF the we´st wıńg, where a prosodic break occurs before a PP with two accented syllables. If the length/phrasing correlation holds, then the partitive construction provides fruitful ground for work on the relation among the factors that contribute to prosodic phrasing. In particular, the lack of a break before of in these examples may stem from a syntactic difference between the partitive and the default Noun Ⳮ PP construction or from a direct interaction between semantics and prosody, which deprives the lexical heads, one, part, couple, and so on of prosodic prominence because they lack a full set of semantic features. 5.3. DISCOURSE EXCEPTIONS. Given/new distinctions also appear to affect the phrasing data, overriding the length account. A correlation between length and phrasing predicts, incorrectly here, that the PPs in 26 are prosodically set off, since they contain more than one accented syllable. However, the discourse context of these examples, given in 27, provides an explanation for why these long PPs do not constitute a separate prosodic phrase.

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(26) a. 㛳 the roóm IN which my sı´ster dıéd. b. 㛳 the roóm OF Doćtor Roýlott. (27) a. 㛳 so that I’ve had to move | OUT of my own room | into the room next door 㛳 the roóm IN which my sı´ster dıéd. b. We moved | into the bedroom next door 㛳 the roóm OF Doćtor Roýlott. In these examples, the item preceding the PP in question, in both cases the phrase the room, refers to an item previously mentioned in the sentence. The coreferential status of this phrase corresponds to an absence of prominence, which prohibits it from occurring as a separate prosodic phrase, and so it merges prosodically with the following prepositional phrase. 5.4. PRAGMATIC EXCEPTIONS. The most clear case of exceptional prosodic behavior correlating with added complexity of form involves example 28 which, as spoken, violates the constituent integrity of the PP. (28) He’s a collector OF 㛳 STRAŃGE ańimals. Four speakers who read 28 in a neutral context rendered the PP as a separate prosodic phrase. In the context of The Speckled Band, however, this sentence has an overriding pragmatic effect: it serves as a clue to the murder weapon (one of the animals), the pause indicating that the following words are of great moment. The word strange is spoken with contrastive stress and the phrasing of the sentence is rearranged to accommodate this intonational aberration. The need for balance between the two halves of a comparative phrase also appears to override the length requirement. In 29, the PP has accents on both these and rooms, yet the phrase is not set off prosodically. (29) You’ve obviously seen | MORE in the´se roo´ms 㛳 THAN was vı´sible to ME´. This violation may be due to the parallelism of the comparative construction. The fact that both more and than occur at the left edge of the phrase in which they are prominent emphasizes the inherent comparison in the two phrases. If the PP in these rooms were to occur in a separate phrase, then the equality of the more and than phrases with respect to length would be lost and the comparison weakened. 5.5. REMAINING EXCEPTIONS. The setting off of the PPs in 30 may be a result of the relative clause construction involved in these examples. (30) a. 㛳 led into the whitewashed corridor 㛳 FRO´M whıćh 㛳 the three bedrooms opened. b. | at the village inn 㛳 FRO´M whıćh 㛳 we could COMMAND a view 㛳 One might expect a relative clause to be set off since it is usually long; the oddity here is that the PP complementizer, from which, that introduces the relative clause in each example is set off in a prosodic phrase of its own. With respect to the length/phrasing correlation, the preposition from, as spoken in the dramatic reading, is spoken with contrastive stress in both examples, as noted above.17 The accented from gives the PP the length needed for a separate prosodic phrase. By contrast, the speakers who read these sentences in isolation did not accent from and did not render the PP from which as a separate prosodic phrase. While this is only a small piece of evidence, it provides 17 Of course, the accented syllable account of the data in 18 begs the question of why the speaker chose to accent normally reduced items, but the phrasing does support a correlation between accented syllable count and prosodic phrasing.

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extra support for the length/phrasing correlation and should prove a good basis for more sophisticated testing. Finally, it appears that the length/phrasing correlation would predict that the PP than his stepdaughter’s in 31 constitutes a separate prosodic phrase since the compound stepdaughter contains two accented syllables. (31) It was LA´RGER THAN his ste´pdaúghter’s 㛳 but just as PLAINLY furnished. The contrastive stress on larger or the contrast involved in the but clause may be causing the shift of the prosodic phrase boundary. To summarize, there is a clear explanation for the exceptional status of most of the phrasings that do not conform to an account of phrasing based on constituent structure and length. This supports the notion that these exceptions are marked phrasings that a speaker uses for some exceptional effect. 6. THE STATUS OF AN UNMARKED PHRASING. In discussing Table 4 I concluded that the prosodic phrasing of clause-final PPs is determined to a large extent by a combination of syntactic constituent-structure information and a phonologically based notion of length. Despite the phrasing of the majority of the PPs, however, a fair number of other factors result in exceptions to this phrasing. How do these factors interrelate to produce the appropriate prosodic units? The traditional generative account of the relation among phonology, syntax, and semantics, represented most explicitly in Chomsky 1971, viewed phonology and semantics as interpretive components that read information off the syntactic derivation and reflect that information as sound and meaning respectively. Assuming that the majority of the PP data fits into the view of phonology and semantics as components that interpret the syntactic structure, how are the data in §5, in which a semantic, discourse, or pragmatic phenomenon is affecting the prosodic phrasing, explained? As exceptions, these phrasings are consistent with the framework originally proposed in Gueron 1980, which presupposes that a secondary set of semantic interpretation rules (SI-2), which makes use of previous discourse and world knowledge, interacts directly with the output of phonological interpretation to identify a discourse determined reading.18 Applying Gueron’s view to Table 4, the unmarked phrasing would result from the rules of prosodic phrasing and SI-1 (logical form) independently interpreting information from the syntactic tree, while the marked phrasing results from the direct action of discourse, pragmatics and semantics on prosodic phrasing. 7. CONCLUSION. The data examined here identify an unmarked reading of clausefinal PPs in read speech that is determined by syntactic and phonological factors. The syntactic phrase, that is, the PP, determines the potential boundary of the prosodic phrase, and the phonologically based accented-syllable count determines whether the boundary can be realized as a prosodic phrase edge. The PP data further indicate that other factors such as the focus domain, given/new distinctions, contrastive stress, and 18 This direct relation between discourse and phonology accounts for the difference between the ‘unmarked’ VP accent in data like (i), and the accented subject, which is acceptable in terms of the discourse, of the otherwise identical data in (ii). Both examples are from Gueron 1980. (i) Some books were bu´rned by Pablo. (ii) First the Chilean military burned the books of all political figures sympathetic to the Allende Government. And then some boóks were burned by Pablo Neruda.

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parallelism are exceptional phenomena that interact with the phrasing of the PP to determine whether the unmarked form is appropriate. The characterization of an unmarked phrasing enabled us to improve on our original prosodic system since it allowed us to implement length rules that handle constituents previously regarded as leftovers from other rules. Many problems with the initial implementation, in particular the tendency to place an unnaturally strong break before short clause-final PPs, were resolved. The notion of an unmarked phrasing also adds to the understanding of how prosody interacts with syntax and semantics, and how marked phrasing resulting from discourse, pragmatic, and other considerations might be handled. Finally, the study provides a handle on the notion of prosodic length and thus suggests additional correlations between length and phrasing. Further work needs to be done on the significance of the secondary phrase boundary and on the status of the verb-adjacent constituents, which had been discarded for this study. The verb-adjacent PPs appear to conform to the mechanisms discussed here, but with the factor of constituent balancing around the verb playing an additional role. A professional dramatic reading is idealized speech, intended to maximize comprehension for an unseen listener. If a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables facilitates perception, as Martin suggests (1972), then a dramatic reading should aim at some rhythmic ideal, which is evidenced in the bifurcation of the data in Table 4. This observation raises several questions including whether and how this rhythmic ideal applies to the rest of the data beyond the prepositional phrase. How would the pattern found here emerge in less formal read speech like e-mail, and in the spontaneous speech of human-computer interaction? The most basic question is why the length/phrasing correlation exhibited in the data exists—why does the presence of a second accented syllable correlate with a pause? The rhythmic structure proposed by Liberman and Selkirk offers a promising direction in considering this question. REFERENCES ALLEN, G. 1975. Speech rhythm: Its relation to performance universals and articulatory timing. Journal of Phonetics 3.75–86. BACHENKO, JOAN, and EILEEN FITZPATRICK. 1990. A computational grammar of discourseneutral prosodic phrasing in English. Computational Linguistics 16.155–70. BACHENKO, JOAN; EILEEN FITZPATRICK; and JEFFREY DAUGHERTY. 1995. A rule-based phrase parser for real-time text-to-speech synthesis. Natural Language Engineering 1, part 2.191–212. BACHENKO, JOAN; EILEEN FITZPATRICK; and C. EDWARD WRIGHT. 1986. The contribution of parsing to prosodic phrasing in an experimental text-to-speech system. Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 145–153. BALTIN, MARK. 1978. PP as a bounding node. North Eastern Linguistic Society 8. BIERWISCH, MANFRED. 1966. Regeln fu¨r die Intonation deutscher Satze. Studia grammatica 7: Untersuchungen uber Akzent und Intonation im Deutschen, 99–201. Berlin: AkademieVerlag. BING, JANET. 1985. Aspects of prosody. New York: Garland. BOLINGER, DWIGHT. 1961. Contrastive accent and contrastive stress. Language 37.83–96. BOLINGER, DWIGHT. 1972. Accent is predictable (if you’re a mind reader). Language 48.633–44. BOLINGER, DWIGHT. 1989. Intonation and its uses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. CHAFE, WALLACE. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1971. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology, ed. by Danny Steinberg and Leon Jakobovits, 183–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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[Received 22 October 1997; revision received 31 August 1999; accepted 4 January 2000]