Prosodic structure

This chapter investigates the relationship between the phonological or prosodic structure of a spoken utterance and its syntactic, semantic, and information structural analysis. A full theory of the form-meaning correspondence must account for the effect of prosodic features such as intonation patterns on interpretation. In line with other work in LFG that is concerned with the contribution made by phonology or prosody to grammatical structure and interpretation, the existence of a separate level of prosodic structure or p-structure within the projection architecture is assumed. The chapter reviews previous LFG approaches to prosody and the place of prosodic structure within the grammar (Section 11.3), before presenting the approach that is adopted which relies on analyzing a string as having two distinct aspects: one syntactic, the s-string, the other phonological/ prosodic, the p-string (Section 11.4). This approach is exemplified with an account of declarative questions and prosodic focus marking.