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Structure and intonation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2026
Abstract
Rules for assigning phrasal intonation to sentences are often assumed to require an autonomous level of intonational structure', distinct from what is usually thought of as surface syntactic structure. The present paper argues that the requisite notion of structure can be subsumed under the generalized notion of surface structure that emerges from the combinatory extension of Categorial Grammar. According to this theory, the syntactic structures and the intonational structures of English are one, and can be captured in a single unified grammar. The interpretations that the grammar provides for such constituents correspond to the entities and open propositions that are concerned in certain discourse-related aspects of intonational meaning that have variously been described as ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ ‘given’ and ‘new’, and ‘presupposition’ and ‘focus’.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1991 by Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to Steven Bird, Dwight Bolinger, Elisabet Engdahl, Ellen Hays, Julia Hirschberg, Jack Hoeksema, Stephen Isard, Aravind Joshi, Ewan Klein, Bob Ladd, Mark Liberman, Mitch Marcus, Dick Oehrle, Donna Jo Napoli, Michael Niv, Janet Pierrehumbert, Henry Thompson, Bonnie Lynn Webber, and three anonymous referees for comments, advice, and moral support at various stages. The research was supported in part by NSF grant CISE IIP:CDA 88–22719, DARPA grant no. N00014–90–J-1863, and ARO grant no. DAAL03–89–C0031 to CIS, University of Pennsylvania.
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