Prosodic and syntactic constraints conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of focus, where the best position for main stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the focused constituent. But focus and stress must match, therefore either stress or the focused constituent must renounce their best position violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for them. This study argues that human language addresses this tension in optimality theoretic terms and that different focus paradigms across different languages reflect different rankings of a shared invariant set of syntactic and prosodic constraints. In particular, only an optimality analysis can account for the focus paradigm of Italian while keeping a prosodic analysis of main stress in accord with the last two decades of phonological research. The analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa (including Chichewa's non-culminant sentences, i.e. sentences lacking a single main stress), making no appeal to language specific parametric devices. Overall, the conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints gives rise to a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints while keeping interface conditions to an absolute minimum.

Our study focuses on the issue of prosodic annotation and of the prosody ~ syntax interface in conversation and is based on a large corpus of conversational speech in French. The results of inter-transcriber agreement tests show that two expert transcribers are consistent in their labeling

variety of registers and speaking styles. Application areas are: development of prosody models for German TTS, unsupervised learning of pitch accent types, corpus search for research on prosody-semantics and prosody-syntax interaction, and the study of more global prosodic parameters (speaking rate, pitch

In recent work a tentative suggestion has emerged: certain processes which appear to be core cases of head movement should be analysed instead as not involving the computational system at all, but rather as arising because of the way that the phonological systems interact with the

Syntax and Prosody in Kashaya Phrasal Accent This paper explores the nature of prosodic phrasing in Kashaya, an endangered language of northern California, as diagnosed by the location of accent. Previous work has reported that iambic feet are constructed across prosodic phrases that can consist

formation—assumptions consistent with the view that the mu-tual interaction of phonology and syntax is confined to the postsyntac-tic operations that translate syntactic structure into prosodic structure.

& Speech is structured into parts by syntactic and prosodic breaks. In locally syntactic ambiguous sentences, the detection of a syntactic break necessarily follows detection of a corre-sponding prosodic break, making an investigation of the imme-diate interplay of syntactic and prosodic information impossible when studying sentences in isolation. This problem can be solved, however, by embedding sentences in a discourse con-text that induces the expectation of either the presence or the absence of a syntactic break right at a prosodic break. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared to acoustically iden-tical sentences in these different contexts. We found in two experiments that the closure positive shift, an ERP component known to be elicited by prosodic breaks, was reduced in size when a prosodic break was aligned with a syntactic break. These results establish that the brain matches prosodic information against syntactic information immediately. &

predicted phrase structure and prosodic inton-ation was analysed as a marker for syntax–prosody interaction. Healthy controls and patients with lesions in the anterior corpus callosum showed this anterior negativity demonstrating an intact interplay between syntax and prosody. No such effect was found

The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing

for syntax, disfluency, speech acts, animacy, information status, coreference, and prosody; along with substantial new annotations of focus/contrast, more prosody, syllables and phones. The combined corpus uses the format of the NITE XML Toolkit, which allows these annotations to be browsed and searched as a