Information packaging correlates of semantic information structure categories
Information packaging correlates of semantic information structure categories

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents an Information Structure (IS) model at the information packaging (IPk) level and its usage in utterance partitioning and in explaining semantic IS category realizations at the pragmatic level. The IPk model proposes a hierarchical view of F0 contours that transforms utterances into binary contrast unit (CU) hierarchies. CUs have binary IPk partitions with two independent and overlapping structures and a nuclear element which project its IPk functions to the whole units it belongs to. Two nuclear accent identification rules are formulated in this paper in order to be used in decoding IPk partition hierarchy by F0 contour analysis. In the second part of the paper several intonational contours of English sentences, having different semantic IS events, are interpreted by correlating semantic IS analysis results with those of the IPk model-based analysis. By decoding IPk structure and functional constituents from F0 contours we can advance our knowledge about the relationship between prosody and intonational meaning.

• Details
• Contents