Prosodic phrases and contrast units in intonation

Abstract

The paper explains the relation between prosodic phrases and Information Structure (IS) by decomposing phrases into hierarchies of embedded contrast/communicative units (CUs). At any level of hierarchies, CUs contains IS partitions supported by two contrasted functional constituents. The functional categories are defined by using a two level IS model. Topic-Focus and CU_predicate-CU_argument are the two independent levels of the proposed IS model. The paper presents different types of IS partition hierarchies for IPs and ips by using F0 contours of certain Romanian utterances. The IS hierarchy patterns are used in low level phrase identification within complex intonational phrases.