Integrating phonetics and phonology in the study of linguistic prominence

Abstract

Since the earliest days of phonetics, researchers have noticed that certain speech units stand out from their environment. This is for example the case of a stressed syllable within a word, or of an accented word within an utterance. These prominent units are usually produced with more effort and perceived with more ease, and they often represent a cornerstone for larger and meaningful structures. The notion of linguistic prominence, however, has received a wide number of contradicting or unspecific definitions. In this article, we present an essentialist definition of prominence, which casts it at the crossroads of linguistic signals, meanings and structures, and of the domain-general functions of highlighting and chunking. The papers in this special issue contribute experimental studies on prominence relations, on their role within and across levels of linguistic description, and on how they shape and further our understanding of language.