Spoken communication is possible because language and speech are highly structured. Different degree of prosodic boundary between words indicates to what extent the words are grouped together. A speaker uses prosodic means to indicate the strength of boundaries. This paper is to find out the relationship between prosodic structure and syntactic structure of sentences based on large corpus analysis. The mapping between prosodic structure and syntactic structure shows that they are highly related. More specifically, all the prosodic boundaries locate on the syntactic boundaries, but the syntactic structure is not the only determinate factor to prosodic boundary. Moreover, the hierarchical structure of prosodic boundaries do not identically matches with that of syntactic structure, sometimes the strongest perceptual break boundary is not the highest syntactic boundary. Prosodic structure of break boundary reflects its own rules. To empty word, as the signal of syntactic boundary, there is location effect.
展开▼
