The parsing of prosody

Prosody has been demonstrated to play some role in parsing the grammatical structure of utterances of texts that might otherwise display surface (syntactic) ambiguity. In the context of this research, it is important to be able to state with reasonable certainty what the prosody of an utterance is. This paper considers the fact that the prosody is itself a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. First, prosodic categories that determine or are marked by the intonational pattern are described for English and Japanese, concentrating on the categories ''pitch accent'' and tonally marked ''phrases'' at levels of the prosodic hierarchy above the (prosodic) word. Then various potential ambiguities in parsing these categories are discussed, with attention to both the phonological and the phonetic contexts which are most conducive to ambiguity between alternative prosodic parses, and to the implications of these ambiguities for claims about the relationship between prosody and syntax.