A Constraint-based Approach to English Prosodic Constituents
Ewan Klein
Division of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK
ewan@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Abstract
The paper develops a constraint-based the-
ory of prosodic phrasing and prominence,
basedonanHPSGframework,withan
implementation in ALE. Prominence and
juncture are represented by n-ary branching
metrical trees. The general aim is to
define prosodic structures recursively, in
parallel with the definition of syntactic
structures. We address a number of prima
facie problems arising from the discrepancy
between syntactic and prosodic structure
1 Introduction
This paper develops a declarative treatment of pros-
odic constituents within the framework of constraint-
based phonology, as developed for example in (Bird,
1995; Mastroianni and Carpenter, 1994). On
such an approach, phonological representations are
encoded with typed feature terms. In addition to
the representational power of complex feature values,
the inheritance hierarchy of types provides a flexible
mechanism for classifying linguistic structures, and
for expressing generalizations by means of type
inference.
To date, little work within constraint-based phono-
logy has addressed prosodic structure above the level
of the foot. In my treatment, I will adopt the following
assumptions:
1. Phonology is induced in parallel with syntactic
structure, rather than being mapped from pre-
built parse trees.
2. Individual lexical items do not impose constraints
on their neighbour’s phonology.
The first of these assumptions ensures that phonology
is compositional, in the sense that the only information
available when assembling the phonology of a com-
plex constituent is the phonology of that constituents
daughters. The second assumption is one that is
standardly adopted in HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994),
in the sense that heads can be subcategorized with
respect to the syntactic and semantic properties of
their arguments (i.e., their arguments’ synsem values),
but not with respect to their arguments’ phonological
properties. Although I am not convinced that this
restriction is correct, it is worthwhile to explore what
kinds of phonological analyses are compatible with it.
Most of the data used in this paper was drawn from
the SOLE spoken corpus (Hitzeman et al., 1998).
1
The
corpus was based on recordings of one speaker reading
approximately 40 short descriptive texts concerning
jewelry.
2 Syntactic and Prosodic Structure
2.1 Metrical Trees
Metrical trees were introduced by Liberman (1977) as
a basis for formulating stress-assignment rules in both
words and phrases. Syntactic constituents are assigned
relative prosodic weight according to the following
rule:
(1) NSR: In a configuration [
C
AB],ifC is a phrasal
category, B is strong.
Prominence is taken to be a relational notion: a
constituent labelled ‘s’ is stronger than its sister.
Consequently, if B in (1) is strong, then A must be
weak.
In the case of a tree like (2), Liberman and
Prince’s (1) yields a binary-branching structure of the
kind illustrated in (3) (where the root of the tree is
unlabeled):
(2)
VP
V
fasten
NP
Det
a
N
cloak
1
The task of recovering relevant examples from the
SOLE corpus was considerably aided by the Gsearch corpus
query system (Corley et al., 1999).
(3)
AF
w
fasten
s
w
a
s
cloak
For any given constituent analysed by a metrical tree t,
the location of its main stress can be found by tracing
a path from the root of t to a terminal element α such
that all nodes on that path are labelled ‘s’. Thus the
main stress in (3) is located on the element cloak.In
general, the most prominent element, defined in this
way, is called the Designated Terminal Element (DTE)
(Liberman and Prince, 1977).
Note that (1) is the metrical version of Chomsky
and Halle’s (1968) Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR), and
encodes the same claim, namely that in the default
case, main stress falls on the last constituent in a
given phrase. Of course, it has often been argued that
the notion of ‘default prominence’ is flawed, since it
supposes that the acceptability of utterances can be
judged in a null context. Nevertheless, there is an
alternative conception: the predictions of the NSR
correctly describe the prominence patterns when the
whole proposition expressed by the clause in question
receives broad focus (Ladd, 1996). This is the view
that I will adopt. Although I will concentrate in
the rest of the paper on the broad focus pattern of
intonation, the approach I develop is intended to link
up eventually with pragmatic information about the
location of narrow focus.
In the formulation above, (1) only applies to
binary-branching constituents, and the question arises
how non-binary branching constituent structures (e.g.,
for VPs headed by ditranstive verbs) should be treated.
One option (Beckman, 1986; Pierrehumbert and
Beckman, 1988; Nespor and Vogel, 1986) would be
to drop the restriction that metrical trees are binary,
allowing structures such as Fig 1. Since the nested
structure which results from binary branching appears
to be irrelevant to phonetic interpretation, I will use
n-ary metrical trees in the following analysis.
In this paper, I will not make use of the Pros-
odic Hierarchy (Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986;
Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1981; Selkirk,
1984). Most of the phenomena that I wish to deal
with lie in the blurry region (Shattuck-Hufnagel and
Turk, 1996) between the Phonological Word and
the Intonational Phrase (IP), and I will just refer
to ‘prosodic constituents’ without committing myself
to a specific set of labels. I will also not adopt
the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk, 1984) which
holds that elements of a given prosodic category
(such as Intonational Phrase) must be exhaustively
analysed into a sequence of elements of the next lower
category (such as Phonological Phrase). However, it
is important to note that every IP will be a prosodic
constituent, in my sense. Moreover, my lower-level
prosodic constituents could be identified with the
ϕ-phrases of (Selkirk, 1981; Gee and Grosjean, 1983;
Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Bachenko and Fitzpatrick,
1990), which are grouped together to make IPs.
2.2 Representing Prosodic Structure
I shall follow standard assumptions in HPSG by
separating the phonology attribute out from syntax-
semantics (SYNSEM):
(4) feat-struc AX
AY
PHON pros
SYNSEM synsem
AZ
The type of value of PHON is pros (i.e., prosody).
In this paper, I am going to take word forms as
phonologically simple. This means that the prosodic
type of word forms will be maximal in the hierarchy.
The only complex prosodic objects will be metrical
trees. The minimum requirements for these are that
we have, first, a way of representing nested prosodic
domains, and second, a way of marking the strong
element (Designated Terminal Element; DTE) in a
given domain.
Before elaborating the prosodic signature further,
I need to briefly address the prosodic status of
monosyllabic function words in English. Although
these are sometimes classified as clitics, Zwicky
(1982) proposes the term Leaners. These “form a
rhythmic unit with the neighbouring material, are
normally unstressed with respect to this material, and
do not bear the intonational peak of the unit. English
articles, coordinating conjunctions, complementizers,
relative markers, and subject and object pronouns are
all leaners in this sense” (Zwicky, 1982, p5). Zwicky
takes pains to differentiate between Leaners and
clitics; the former combine with neighbours to form
Phonological Phrases (with juncture characterized by
external sandhi), whereas clitics combine with their
hosts to form Phonological Words (where juncture is
characterized by internal sandhi).
Since Leaners cannot bear intonational peaks,
they cannot act as the DTE of a metrical tree.
Consequently, the value of the attribute DTE in a
metrical tree must be the type of all prosodic objects
which are not Leaners. I call this type full,and
it subsumes both Prosodic Words (of type p-wrd)
and metrical trees (of type mtr). Moreover, since
Leaners form a closer juncture with their neighbours
than Prosodic Words do, we distinguish two kinds
of metrical tree. In a tree of type full-mtr, all the
daughters are of type full, whereas in a tree of type
lnr-mtr, only the DTE is of type full.
AF
w
fasten
w
w
the
s
cloak
s
w
at
w
the
s
collar
Figure 1: Non-binary Metrical Tree
pros
lnr full
p-wrd
mtr
DOM: list(pros)
DTE: full
lnr-mtr
DOM: list(lnr) A8CW1CX
DTE: 1
full-mtr
DOM: list(full)
Figure 2: Prosodic Signature
In terms of the attribute-value logic, we therefore
postulate a type mtr of metrical tree which introduces
the feature DOM (prosodic domain) whose value is a
list of prosodic elements, and a feature DTE whose
value is a full prosodic object:
(5) mtr AX
AY
DOM list(pros)
DTE full
AZ
Fig 2 displays the prosodic signature for the
grammar. The types lnr-mtr and full-mtr specialise the
appropriateness conditions on mtr, as discussed above.
Notice that in the constraint for objects of type lnr-mtr,
A8 is the operation of appending two lists.
Since elements of type pros can be word-forms
or metrical trees, the DOM value in a mtr can, in
principle, be a list whose elements range from simple
word-forms to lists of any level of embedding. One
way of interpreting this is to say that DOM values
need not obey the Strict Layer Hypothesis (briefly
mentioned in Section 2.1 above).
To illustrate, a sign whose phonology value
corresponded to the metrical tree (6) (where the
word this receives narrow focus) would receive the
representation in Fig 3.
(6)
AF
w
fasten
s
s
this
w
cloak
BE
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BG
sign
PHON
BE
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
B6
fasten, 1
BE
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
BW
2 this, cloak
BX
DTE 2
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
B7
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
Figure 3: Feature-based Encoding of a Metrical Tree
3 Associating Prosody with Syntax
In this section, I will address the way in which
prosodic constituents can be constructed in parallel
with syntactic ones. There are two, orthogonal,
dimensions to the discussion. The first is whether
the syntactic construction in question is head-initial
or head-final. The second is whether any of the
constituents involved in the construction is a Leaner
or not. I will take the first dimension as primary, and
introduce issues about Leaners as appropriate.
The approach which I will present has been
implemented in ALE (Carpenter and Penn, 1999), and
although I will largely avoid presenting the rules in
ALE notation, I have expressed the operations for
building prosodic structures so as to closely reflect the
relational constraints encoded in the ALE grammar.
3.1 Head-Initial Constructions
As far as head-initial constructions are concerned,
I will confine my attention to syntactic constituents
which are assembled by means of HPSG’s Head-
BE
BI
BI
BG
phrase
PHON mkMtrB4CWϕ
0
BNϕ
1
BNBMBMBMϕ
n
CXB5
SYNSEM
CW
COMPS CWCX
CX
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
A0AX
BE
BI
BI
BI
BG
word
PHON ϕ
0
COMPS
AS
1
CW
PHON ϕ
1
CX
, BMBMBM ,
n
CW
PHON ϕ
1
CX
AT
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
1 , BMBMBM , n
Figure 4: Head-Complement Rule
Complement Rule (Pollard and Sag, 1994), illustrated
in Fig 4. The ALE rendering of the rule is given in (7).
(7) head_complement rule
(phrase, phon:MoPhon,
synsem:(comps:[],
spr:S,
head:Head))
===>
cat> (word, phon:HdPhon,
synsem:(comps:Comps,
spr:S,
head:Head)),
cats> Comps,
goal> (getPhon(Comps, PhonList),
mkMtr([HdPhon|PhonList], MoPhon)).
The function mkMtr (make metrical tree) (encoded
as a relational constraint in (7)) takes a list consisting
of all the daughters’ phonologies and builds an
appropriate prosodic object ϕ. As the name of the
function suggests, this prosodic object is, in the
general case, a metrical tree. However, since metrical
trees are relational (i.e., one node is stronger than the
others), it makes no sense to construct a metrical tree
if there is only a single daughter. In other words, if the
head’s COMPS list is empty, then the argument mkMtr
is a singleton list containing only the head’s PHON
value, and this is returned unaltered as the function
value.
(8) mkMtr(CW 1 [pros]CX)= 1
The general case requires at least the first two elements
on the list of prosodies to be of type full, and builds a
tree of type full mtr.
(9) mkMtr( 1 CW[full], [full], BMBMBM , 2 CX)=
BE
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM 1
DTE 2
BF
BJ
BH
Note that the domain of the output tree is the input
list, and the DTE is just the right-hand element of the
domain. (10) shows the constraint in ALE notation;
the relation rhd DTE/2 simply picks out the last
element of the list L.
(10) mkMtr(([full, full|_], L),
(full_mtr, dom:L, dte:X)) if
rhd_DTE(L, X).
Examples of the prosody constructed for an N-bar
and a VP are illustrated in (11)–(12). For convenience,
Iuse[of the samurai] to abbreviate the AVM
representation of the metrical tree for of the samurai,
and similarly for [a cloak]and[at the collar].
(11) mkMtr(CWpossession,[of the samurai]CX)=
BE
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
BW
possession, 1 [of the samurai]
BX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
(12) mkMtr(CWfasten,[a cloak], [at the collar]CX)=
BE
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
BW
fasten,[a cloak], 1 [at the collar]
BX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
Let’s now briefly consider the case of a weak
pronominal NP occurring within a VP. Zwicky
(1986) develops a prosodically-based account of the
distribution of unaccented pronouns in English, as
illustrated in the following contrasts:
(13) a. We took in the unhappy little mutt right
away.
b.*We took in h
ˇ
im right away.
c. We took h
ˇ
im in right away.
(14) a. Martha told Noel the plot of Gravity’s
Rainbow.
b.*Martha told Noel
ˇ
it.
c. Martha told
ˇ
it to Noel.
Pronominal NPs can only form prosodic phrases in
their own right if they bear accent; unaccented pro-
nominals must combine with a host to be admissible.
Zwicky’s constraints on when this combination can
occur are as follows:
(15) A personal pronoun NP can form a prosodic
phrase with a preceding prosodic host only if the
following conditions are satisfied:
a. the prosodic host and the pronominal NP are
sisters;
b. the prosodic host is a lexical category;
c. the prosodic host is a category that governs
case marking.
BE
BI
BI
BG
phrase
PHON extMtrB4ϕ
1
BNϕ
0
B5
SYNSEM
CW
SPR CWCX
CX
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
A0AX 1
BE
BI
BI
BI
BG
phrase
PHON ϕ
0
SPR
AS
1
CW
PHON ϕ
1
CX
AT
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
Figure 5: Head-Specifier Rule
These considerations motivate a third clause to the
definition of mkMtr:
(16) mkMtr(CW 1 [p-wrd], 2 [lnr]CXA8 3 )=
mkMtr(CW
BE
BI
BG
lnr-mtr
DOM CW 1 , 2 CX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BH
A8
3
CX )
That is, if the first two elements of the list are a
Prosodic Word and a Leaner, then the two of them
combine to form a lnr-mtr, followed by any other
material on the input list. Because of the way in
which this prosodic constraint is associated with the
Head-Complement Rule, the prosodic host in (16),
namely the p-wrd tagged 1 , is automatically the
syntactic head of the construction. As a result,
Zwicky’s conditions in (15) fall out directly.
(17)–(18) illustrate the effects of the new clause. In
the first case, the lnr-mtr consisting of told and it is the
only item on the list in the recursive call to mkMtr in
(16), and hence the base clause (8) in the definition of
mkMtr applies. In the second case, there is more than
one item on the list, and the lnr-mtr becomes a subtree
in a larger metrical domain.
(17) mkMtr([told, it]) =
BE
BI
BI
BG
lnr-mtr
DOM
BW
1 told, it
BX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
(18) mkMtr([told, it,[to Noel]]) =
BE
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
B6
BE
BI
BI
BG
lnr-mtr
DOM
BW
1 told, it
BX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
2 [to Noel]
B7
DTE 2
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
By contrast, examples of the form told Noel
ˇ
it fail to
parse, since (16) only licenses a head-initial lnr-mtr
when the Leaner immediately follows the head. We
could however admit told Noel
´
it, if the lexicon
contained a suitable entry for accent-bearing
´
it with
prosody of type p wrd, since this would satisfy the
requirement that only prosodies of type full can be the
value of a metrical tree’s DTE.
3.2 Head-Final Constructions
To illustrate head-final constructions, I will focus
on NP structures, considering the combination of
determiners and prenominal adjectives with N-bar
phrases. I take the general case to be illustrated by
combining a determiner like this with a phrase like
treasured possession to form one metrical tree. Since
treasured possession will itself be a metrical tree, I
introduce a new, binary, function for this purpose,
namely extMtr (extend metrical tree) which adds a
new prosodic element to the left boundary of an
existing tree. For convenience, I will call the leftmost
argument of extMtr the extender.
Fig 5 illustrates the way in which extMtr is used
to build the prosody of a specifier-head construction,
while (19) provides the definition of extMtr.An
example of the output is illustrated in (20).
(19) extMtr( 1 [full],
AY
DOM 2
DTE 3
AZ
)=
BE
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM 1 A8 2
DTE 3
BF
BJ
BH
(20) extMtr(this,[treasured possession]) =
BE
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
BW
this, treasured, 1 possession
BX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
However, there are now a number of special cases
to be considered. First, we have to allow that the head
phrase is a single Prosodic Word such as possession,
rather than a metrical tree. Second, the prosodic
structure to be built will be more complex if the head
phrase itself contains a post-head complement, as in
treasured possession of the samurai. Crosscutting this
dimension is the question of whether the extender is a
Leaner, in which case it will form a lnr-mtr with the
immediately following element. We will look at these
cases in turn.
(i) The head is a single Prosodic Word When the
second prosodic argument of extMtr is not in fact a
metrical tree, it calls mkMtr to build a new metrical
tree. Definition (21) is illustrated in (22).
NP
Det
the
Nom
AdjP
most treasured
Nom
N
possession
PP
P
of
NP
the samurai
Figure 6: Right-branching NP Structure
AF
w
w
the most
w
treasured
s
possession
s
of the samurai
Figure 7: Flat NP Prosodic Structure
(21) extMtr( 1 [pros], 2 [p-wrd]) =
mkMtr(CW 1 , 2 CX)
(22) extMtr(treasured, possession)=
BE
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
BW
treasured, 1 possession
BX
DTE 1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
(ii) The head contains post-head material Perhaps
the most awkward kind of mismatch between syntactic
and prosodic structure arises when when the comple-
ment or postmodifier of a syntactic head is ‘promoted’
to the level of sister of the constituent in which the
head occurs; this creates a disjuncture between the
lexical head and whatever follows. Fig 6 gives a
typical example of this phenomenon, where the noun
possession is followed by a prepositional complement,
while Fig 7 represents the prosodic constituency.
Let’s consider how treasured should combine with
possession of the samurai. The Head-Complement
Rule will have built a prosodic structure of the form
[possession [of the samurai]] for the latter phrase. To
obtain the correct results, we need to be able to detect
that this is a metrical tree M whose leftmost element
is a lexical head (by contrast, for example, with the
structure [treasured possession]). In just this case, the
extender can not only extend M but also create a new
subtree by left-associating with the lexical head.
2
The
required definition is shown in (23) and illustrated in
example (24).
(23) extMtr( 1 [full],
AY
DOM 2 p-wrd A8 3
DTE 4
AZ
)=
2
The special prosodic status of lexical heads is incorpor-
ated in Selkirk’s (1981) notion of ϕ-phrase, and subsequent
developments thereof, such as (Selkirk, 1986; Nespor and
Vogel, 1986).
BE
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM extMtr( 1 , 2 ) A8 3
DTE 4
BF
BJ
BH
provided that 2 is the lexical head.
(24) extMtr(this,
BE
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
BW
possession,
1
[of the samurai]
BX
DTE
1
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
)=
BE
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM
B6
BE
BG
DOM
BW
this,
2
possession
BX
DTE
2
BF
BH
,
1
[of the samurai]
B7
DTE
1
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
Turning back briefly to the Head-Specifier Rule shown
in Fig 5, we can now see that if ϕ
0
is a metrical
tree M, then the value of extMtr(ϕ
1
BNϕ
0
) depends on
the syntactic information associated with the leftmost
element P of that tree. That is, if P is the phonology
of the lexical head of the phrase, then it can be
prosodically disjoined from the following material,
otherwise the metrical tree M is extended in the
standard way.
There are various ways that this sensitivity to
syntactic role might be accommodated. One option
would to inspect the DTRS (daughters) attribute of a
sign. However, I will briefly sketch the treatment
implemented in the ALE grammar, which does not
build a representation of daughters. Instead, I have
introduced an attribute LEX inside the value of HEAD
which is constrained in the case of lexical items to be
token-identical to the PHON value. For example, the
type for possession is approximately as follows:
(25)
BE
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BI
BG
word
PHON 1 possession
SYNSEM
BE
BI
BI
BG
SYN CY HEAD
AY
noun
LEX 1
AZ
ARG-ST CWPPCX
BF
BJ
BJ
BH
BF
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BJ
BH
Since LEX is a head feature, it percolates up to
any phrase projected from that head, and allows the
PHON value of the lexical head to be accessed at
that projection; i.e., headed phrases will also bear a
specification [LEX phon], which can be interpreted as
saying “my lexical head’s phonology value is phon”.
In addition, we let the function extMtr in Fig 5 take as
an extra argument the HEAD value of the mother, and
then test whether the leftmost Prosodic Word in the
metrical tree being extended is the same as the LEX
value of the mother’s HEAD value.
(iii) Extending the head with a Leaner Finally,
there is an additional clause to accommodate the
case where the extending element is a Leaner. This
triggers a kind of left association, in that the result of
combining a with [treasured possession]isastructure
of the form [[a treasured] possession].
(26) extMtr( 1 [lnr],
AY
DOM CW 2 CXA8
3
DTE 4
AZ
)=
BE
BI
BG
full-mtr
DOM extMtr( 1 , 2 ) A8 3
DTE 4
BF
BJ
BH
This will also allow an unaccented subject pronoun
to left-associate with the lexical head of a VP, as in
[[he provoked][the objections of everyone]] (Gee and
Grosjean, 1983).
4 Concluding Remarks
I believe that the preceding analysis demonstrates that
despite the well-known mismatches between syntactic
and prosodic structure, it is possible to induce the
required prosodic structures in tandem with syntax.
Moreover, the analysis retains rather conventional
notions of syntactic constituency, eschewing the non-
standard syntactic constituents advocated by Prevost
and Steedman (1993), Steedman (1990; 1991).
Although I have only mentioned two syntactic rules
in HPSG, the radically underspecified nature of these
rules, coupled with rich lexical entries, means that the
approach I have sketched has more generality than
might appear at first. With the addition of a rule
for prenominal adjectives, prosodically interpreted
like the Head-Specifier Rule, we can derive a range
of analyses as summarised in (27). Here, I use
square brackets to demarcate trees of type full-mtr and
parentheses for trees of type lnr-mtr.
(27) a. [this possession](of the samurai)
b. [this treasured possession](of the samurai)
c. (a treasured) possession
d. (a treasured) possession [(of these) people]
e. Kim gave (the book) (to the boy)
f. Kim (gave it) (to the boy)
g. Kim is happy [about Lee]
h. Kim is happy [(that Lee) is fond (of the bird)]
i. Kim wanted (to rely) (on the report) [(that
Lee) is fond (of the bird)]
It would be straightforward to augment the grammar
to accommodate post-modifiers of various kinds,
which would behave prosodically like post-head
complements. By contrast, auxiliaries do not conform
to the association between headed structures and
prosodic structures that we have seen so far. That is, if
auxiliaries are a subtype of complement-taking verbs,
as assumed within HPSG, then they depart from the
usual pattern in behaving prosodically like specifiers
rather than heads.
There are numerous directions in which the current
work can be extended. In terms of empirical coverage,
a more detailed account of weak function words
seems highly desirable. The approach can also
be tested within the context of speech synthesis,
and preliminary work is underway on extending the
Festival system (Black and Taylor, 1997) to accept
input text marked up with metrical trees of the kind
presented here. In the longer term, the intention is to
integrate prosodic realisation within the framework of
an HPSG-based concept-to-speech system.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Philip Miller, Mike Reape, Ivan Sag
and Paul Taylor for their helpful comments on various
incarnations of the work reported here.
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