Cognitive features for sentence stress pattern description

Abstract

The paper proposes cognitive features for describing sentence stress patterns produced by emphasized and non-emphasized intonational contours of utterances. Cognitive features consist in hierarchies of binary cognitive structures described in terms of the functional categories of the cognitive model proposed in the paper. The cognitive perspective of the model transforms weak-strong “metrical” structures used by Ladd (2008), into binary structures with one nuclear element and two structural levels: CU_argument-CU_predicate CU_emotional-CU_rational element. A set of rules are presented, for nucleus identification in both emphasized and non-emphasized contours. Intonational contours analyzed in the paper correspond to some sentences also discussed in Ladd (2008). Cognitive analyses aim to assign different cognitive descriptions to different utterances even in the case of the same sentence when they produce different sentence stress patterns. We conclude that the prosody conveys non-linguistic meaning which must be understood at the cognitive or pre-linguistic level.