A Cognitive View on Prominence Relations

Abstract

The present paper proposes a cognitive view on prominence relations of utterances by treating them as prosodic relations with weak-strong metrical structure. Considering this aspect, prosodic relations have a cognitive structure and a prominence structure, both of them reflecting the structures of cognitive relations generated at cortical level during the evocation of auditory objects corresponding to speech constituents. Ladd (2008) introduces two types of relations in the F0 contour description, prosodic and prominence relations, but we suggest a single type of relation between speech constituents, named prosodic relation, and consider it is in the same time a prominence relation due to its weak-strong metrical structure.  In section 2, the paper presents the cognitive model of information structure by defining the categories used for the description of cognitive and prominence structures of prosodic relations. In section 3, the cognitive and prominence structures of four utterances of the word permit as noun and verb, in descending and ascending F0 contours, are compared with those of four utterances of certain small statements and questions having words as constituents. All the contours mentioned are useful for understanding how utterances can be decomposed into binary hierarchies of prosodic relations with local or global prominent (strong) constituent, aiming to motivate researchers to take into account the cognitive interpretation of F0 contours.