Publisher's Synopsis
At the 2nd International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, a special session on "Prosody: The Phrase and Beyond" was held in order to provide a forum of discussion for this complex issue. Featuring selected papers which were presented at the symposium, this volume highlights the importance of prosody for the structuring of information in the speech communication process beyond more narrowly defined linguistic structures. The papers range from more phonologically oriented issues of downstep and downdrift as well as accent lending pitch movements, to the phonetic questions of clause-internal filled pauses, paragraph intonation, prosodically marked information units in spontaneous monologue and prosodic discourse structure. It is hoped that this publication will help to overcome the dichotomy between phonetics and phonology and to stimulate further discussion of important issues in the study of prosody.
