Prosodic signaling of information and discourse structure from a typological perspective
Anastasia Karlsson, David House, Jan‐Olof Svantesson · Lund University Publications (Lund University) · 2015
This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spon- taneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boun- dary tones are enhanced to mark information struc- turing. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic signaling of the boundary between Topic and Com- ment. Discourse structure is reflected in prosody, and we find higher boundary tones near the bounda- ries between Discourse Units. The results are dis- cussed in terms of a typology of spoken discourse.