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<Paper uid="P00-1028">
  <Title>A Constraint-based Approach to English Prosodic Constituents</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Syntactic and Prosodic Structure
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Metrical Trees
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Metrical trees were introduced by Liberman (1977) as a basis for formulating stress-assignment rules in both words and phrases. Syntactic constituents are assigned relative prosodic weight according to the following rule:</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> AB],ifC is a phrasal category, B is strong.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Prominence is taken to be a relational notion: a constituent labelled 's' is stronger than its sister. Consequently, if B in (1) is strong, then A must be weak.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> In the case of a tree like (2), Liberman and Prince's (1) yields a binary-branching structure of the kind illustrated in (3) (where the root of the tree is  For any given constituent analysed by a metrical tree t, the location of its main stress can be found by tracing a path from the root of t to a terminal element a such that all nodes on that path are labelled 's'. Thus the main stress in (3) is located on the element cloak.In general, the most prominent element, defined in this way, is called the Designated Terminal Element (DTE) (Liberman and Prince, 1977).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> Note that (1) is the metrical version of Chomsky and Halle's (1968) Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR), and encodes the same claim, namely that in the default case, main stress falls on the last constituent in a given phrase. Of course, it has often been argued that the notion of 'default prominence' is flawed, since it supposes that the acceptability of utterances can be judged in a null context. Nevertheless, there is an alternative conception: the predictions of the NSR correctly describe the prominence patterns when the whole proposition expressed by the clause in question receives broad focus (Ladd, 1996). This is the view that I will adopt. Although I will concentrate in the rest of the paper on the broad focus pattern of intonation, the approach I develop is intended to link up eventually with pragmatic information about the location of narrow focus.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> In the formulation above, (1) only applies to binary-branching constituents, and the question arises how non-binary branching constituent structures (e.g., for VPs headed by ditranstive verbs) should be treated. One option (Beckman, 1986; Pierrehumbert and Beckman, 1988; Nespor and Vogel, 1986) would be to drop the restriction that metrical trees are binary, allowing structures such as Fig 1. Since the nested structure which results from binary branching appears to be irrelevant to phonetic interpretation, I will use n-ary metrical trees in the following analysis.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> In this paper, I will not make use of the Prosodic Hierarchy (Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986; Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1981; Selkirk, 1984). Most of the phenomena that I wish to deal with lie in the blurry region (Shattuck-Hufnagel and Turk, 1996) between the Phonological Word and the Intonational Phrase (IP), and I will just refer to 'prosodic constituents' without committing myself to a specific set of labels. I will also not adopt the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk, 1984) which holds that elements of a given prosodic category (such as Intonational Phrase) must be exhaustively analysed into a sequence of elements of the next lower category (such as Phonological Phrase). However, it is important to note that every IP will be a prosodic constituent, in my sense. Moreover, my lower-level prosodic constituents could be identified with the ph-phrases of (Selkirk, 1981; Gee and Grosjean, 1983; Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Bachenko and Fitzpatrick, 1990), which are grouped together to make IPs.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Representing Prosodic Structure
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> I shall follow standard assumptions in HPSG by separating the phonology attribute out from syntax-</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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