Prosody and Parsing: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction surveys some recent studies of the relationship between prosody and syntax, and provides a context for the papers contained in this issue ofLanguage and Cognitive Processes. It charts the development of research from the study of the mapping between syntax and phonetics to on-line investigations of the use of prosodic information in the parsing of utterances. It highlights the importance of recognising the phonological organisation of prosody as a grammatical system, and discusses issues concerning the prosodic marking of focus, the existence of a hierarchical prosodic structure, and prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure.