Accents & Syntactic Attachment: Exploring how pitch accents affect the resolution

Morehead State University, Morehead KY

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of linguistic prosody (as opposed to affective or emotional prosody) on sentence processing. In particular, it explores the effects of pitch accents on syntactically ambiguous sentences. It is well-known that prosodic boundaries, one of the two major prosodic units in English, can affect the attachment of ambiguous phrases. Pitch accents, on the other hand, are usually thought to influence only semantic and discourse representations of a sentence, by marking given vs. new vs. contrastive information. This research explores the hypothesis that pitch accents can attract attachment, especially in the presence of a prosodic boundary after the nearest attachment site. A series of auditory experiments will explore accent effects on attachment in three different syntactic structures, with and without supportive prosodic boundaries. Following experiments will place the sentences in contexts to examine whether the focus conveyed by a preceding question can also attract attachment and whether accents remain informative for attachment when they clearly contrast with prior context.