Second ESCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis September 12-15, 1994 Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY, USA

Discourse Structural Constraints on Accent in Narrative

Christine H. Nakatani

Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

This paper examines the relationship between discourse structure and intonational prominence or pitch accent It is argued, based on the distribution of pitch accent in spontaneous narrative speech, that accent function must be interpreted against a dynamic background of linguistic factors, including grammatical function, lexical form, and discourse structural constraints that affect the attentional status of referents. Modeling of the interactions among these factors should enable richer prosodic variation in speech generation systems.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Nakatani, Christine H. (1994): "Discourse structural constraints on accent in narrative", In SSW2-1994, 228-231.