Abstract
The assignment of phrasal prominence has been variously attributed to syntactic structure, part of speech, predictability, informativity, and speaker's intent. A recent account asserts that prominence is memorized on a by-word basis as Accent Ratio (AR), the likelihood that a word is accented (Nenkova et al. 2007). We examined whether AR outperforms the traditional predictors, in particular syntax and informativity, and if not, whether the traditional predictors shed light on the variance left unexplained by AR. We used a corpus of spoken American English consisting of the first inaugural addresses of six recent American presidents, hand-annotated for stress by two native English speakers. Regression models fitted to the data revealed that AR, syntax, and informativity all independently matter. Dividing the data into high-prominence and low-prominence tokens further revealed that AR and informativity are significant among low-prominence words, but only syntax is significant among high-prominence words. We conclude that although AR is a highly successful predictor, certain aspects of phrasal prominence require reference to syntax and informativity.
Highlights
Words in an English sentence are typically characterized by a range of prominence
While AR is an excellent predictor of prominence, its explanatory power goes only so far
The significance of the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR)/Compound Stress Rule (CSR) even in a model controlling for AR and a number of linguistic variables suggests that sentential prominence is assigned at least to some degree according to syntactic structure rather than purely through memorization, informativity, and other linguistic variables
Summary
Words in an English sentence are typically characterized by a range of prominence. Consider the following sentence as delivered by Ronald Reagan on January 20, 1981:. An alternative view holds that such mechanical stress rules are illusory: sentential prominences are not a matter of stress, but of pitch accents that are individually meaningful and whose distribution reflects the speaker’s intent, with accents falling on information foci in the sentence (Bolinger, 1972). This theory is much harder to test since we do not have direct access to the speaker’s (or the listener’s) mental states and expressive goals, but we may be able to approximate meaning in terms of informativity: informative words tend to be stressed, uninformative words tend to be unstressed. Frequency and informativity seem to capture the function word vs. content word distinction, but the overall rising stress contour and the placement of primary stress on the rightmost content word remain a mystery
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