ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Syntax, Pauses, and Temporal Relations in the Final Part of the Sentence

Peter Molbæk Hansen, Niels Reinholt Petersen, Ebbe Spang-Hanssen

Department of General and Applied Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen S., Denmark

The paper is concerned with sentence final phenomena, viz. the question of final lengthening, and the occurrence of pauses in Danish news reading. The main findings were (1) that a complementary relationship exists between preboundary lengthening and the occurrence of a silent interval, sentence internally as well as between sentences; and (2) that there is a tendency for pauses to be overrepresented toward the end of the sentence. It is speculated that the latter tendency is related to information structure.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hansen, Peter Molbæk / Petersen, Niels Reinholt / Spang-Hanssen, Ebbe (1993): "Syntax, pauses, and temporal relations in the final part of the sentence", In Prosody-1993, 160-163.