Syntax and Semantics at Tone Unit Boundaries

Abstract

The relationship between syntax and prosody has spawned a vast literature over the last years. In the present paper, we particularly capitalise on the corpus-linguistic model of talk units as suggested by Halford (1996) and elaborated further by Esser (1998) and Mukherjee (2001). A major tenet of this model is the assumption that the boundaries of contour-defined tone units are usually syntactically motivated and that prosody and syntax can thus be shown to interact at these boundaries: it is here that the speaker signals various degrees of completeness or incompleteness of the utterance ‘so far’ to the hearer. This results in different degrees of expectancies on the part of the hearer. In the present paper, the relevance of the tone unit boundary as an ‘expectancy-relevance place’ is discussed in a wider setting. In particular, we provide data from a corpus-based experiment and an in-depth functional analysis which reveal that a variety of syntactic and semantic factors come into play at tone unit boundaries.