Prosody and Information Structure

In speech, information is conveyed using words, syntactic structures, and prosody to distinguish new information from discourse-given or inferable information and link the meanings of words and phrases to discourse antecedents. This review examines the role of prosody in communicating information structure. The point of departure is seminal work on information structure developed with reference to English, and corresponding work laying the foundation for current approaches to prosody as a phonological phenomenon. Corpus and experimental studies are reviewed for evidence that ( a ) speakers produce prosody in relation to focus and givenness and ( b ) listeners perceive and interpret prosodic cues to information structure meaning. Empirical findings show qualified evidence that listeners attend to prosody in processing and comprehending speech, though production data clearly show a many-to-many correspondence between form and meaning. A proposal that bridges these findings relates phonological and/or phonetic prominence scales to scales over information structure.