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- Title
Focus and the Interpretation of Pitch Accent: Disambiguating Embedded Questions.
- Authors
Schafer, Amy; Carlson, Katy; Clifton, Jr., Charles; Frazier, Lyn
- Abstract
The article presents information on four experiments designed to investigate whether pitch accents are used by listeners to disambiguate otherwise ambiguous syntactic strings. It informs that experiments one through four contrast embedded question and relative clause analysis. Experiment five contrasts an embedded question and a temporal adjunct analysis. It is stated that the final pitch accents is not necessarily the most prominent accent in the phrase. Pitch accent is not the only factor that can affect listeners' interpretations of sentences that are ambiguous between question and other interpretations. It is stated that prosodic phrasing can play a role in disambiguating English interrogative and relative pronouns.
- Subjects
STRESS (Linguistics); INTONATION (Phonetics); SYNTAX (Grammar); ADJUNCTS (Grammar); RELATIVE clauses; PRONOUNS (Grammar); SEMANTICS; PARTS of speech; PHONETICS
- Publication
Language & Speech, 2000, Vol 43, Issue 1, p75
- ISSN
0023-8309
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/00238309000430010301