Structure and Intonation in Spoken Language Understanding
Penn collection
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Contributor
Abstract
The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their traditional surface-syntactic structure. However, the notion of "intonational structure" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can be subsumed under a rather different notion of syntactic surface structure that emerges from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" extension to Categorial Grammar. Interpretations of constituents at this level are in turn directly related to "information structures", or discourse-related notions of "theme", "rheme", "focus" and "presupposition". Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems.