Form and function in the representation of speech prosody

Abstract

The way in which prosody contributes to meaning is still, today, a poorly understood process corresponding to a mapping between two levels of representation, for neither of which there is any general consensus. It is argued that annotation of prosody generally consists in describing both prosodic function and prosodic form, but that it would be preferable to clearly distinguish the two levels. One elementary annotation system for prosodic function, IF-annotation, is, it has been argued, sufficient to capture at least those aspects of prosodic function which influence syntactic interpretation. The annotation of prosodic form can be carried out automatically by means of an F0 modelling algorithm, MOMEL, and an automatic coding scheme, INTSINT. The resulting annotation is under-determined by the IF-annotation, but defining mapping rules between representations of function and representation of form could provide an interesting means of establishing an enriched functional annotation system through analysis by synthesis.