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The Prosodic Phrasing of Clause-Final Prepositional Phrases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Eileen Fitzpatrick
Eileen Fitzpatrick*
Affiliation:
Montclair State University
*
Linguistics Department, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043 [fitzpatr@sapir.montclair.edu]
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Abstract

Spoken language is not produced in a continuous flow; it is broken up into phrases. An understanding of phrase-boundary placement is critical for comprehension and of great importance in text-to-speech technology. The knowledge that speakers use to determine phrasal boundaries has been attributed in the literature to many seemingly competing factors, syntactic, semantic, phonological, discourse, and pragmatic. This article reports on a study of the boundaries of a single type of data, clause-final prepositional phrases (PPs). The study was done to improve the phrasing of a text-to-speech synthesizer. The syntactic constituency of the PP and its length as measured in accented syllables account for an overwhelming majority of the data. The few exceptions to this account fall into natural categories of semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, which suggests they have the status of marked forms.

Information

Type
Short Report
Information
Language , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 544 - 561
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

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