Discourse Structure and Intonational Phrasing

Theories that relate discourse structure and intonational structure often concentrate on the discourse functions of pitch accents and boundary tones. Intonational phrasing, however, is less prominently investigated. This paper focuses on intonational phrasing and its contribution to the construction of a discourse representation. I argue that intonational phrasing determines minimal discourse units which serve as the building blocks in a discourse representation. Even though minimal discourse units often correspond to syntactic constituents, sometimes they cross constituent boundaries. The problem can be illustrated by the very first sentence from the novel Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind, in (1).

The paper is organized as follows: In section 2, I discuss different elements of discourse representation in terms of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and extend the formalism to segmented DRT, which is an attempt to integrate discourse relations into DRT. In section 3, I discuss the different elements of the intonational structure and their function with respect to the discourse structure. While pitch accents and boundary tones have received various functions, the discourse function of intonational phrasing has rarely been investigated. In section 4, I discuss the different parameters that determine the intonational phrasing. Besides metrical, phonological and syntactic parameters, semantics plays an important role. This function has been termed differently: Halliday (1967) introduced the term informational unit, while Selkirk (1984) uses sense unit. However, there is no semantic account of these terms. I argue that the semantics of intonational phrasing can be best accounted for in terms of discourse units. Discourse units are defined by their function to serve as arguments in discourse relations.