Text punctuation and prosody in Greek

Abstract

A production experiment was carried out, in order to investigate text punctuation, including standard as well as ungrammatical (communicative) punctuation marks, and prosody relations. It is shown that punctuation is directly related to the duration of pauses, leading to the following structure: question mark>exclamation mark>full stop> colon>comma> ellipsis. Pitch resetting occurs in all cases, except for commas and ellipses, and gender differences seem to be significant. Ungrammatical punctuation is more prominently marked by both temporal and tonal means.