... document structure can be seen as an extension of Nunberg's `text-grammar'; it is also closely related to `logical' mark-up in languages like HTML and LATEX. We show that by using this intermediate representation, several subtasks in language generation and language understanding can be defined more cleanly.

Correct pronunciation of spoken language requires the appropriate modulation of acoustic characteristics of speech to convey linguistic information at a suprasegmental level. Such prosodic modulation is a key aspect of spoken language and is an important component of foreign language learning, for purposes of both comprehension and intelligibility. Computer aided pronunciation teaching involves automatic analysis of the speech of a non-native talker in order to provide a diagnosis of the learner's performance in comparison with the speech of a native talker. This thesis describes research undertaken to automatically analyse the prosodic aspects of speech for computer aided pronunciation teaching. It is necessary to describe the suprasegmental composition of a learner's speech in order to characterise significant deviations from a native-like prosody, and to offer some kind of corrective diagnosis. Phonological theories of prosody aim to describe the suprasegmental composition of speech...

This paper deals with the intonation of sentence external elements in Catalan. Its main purpose is to investigate the claim that there is a correspondence between prosodic form and grammatical function, so that syntactic independence is paralleled by prosodic independency. A related goal is to identify the mechanisms for signalling prosodic independency and/or dependency. To that end, a production experiment was devised eliciting the same sentences in different pitch ranges. The conclusion is that sentence external elements do not constitute a uniform category, either syntactically or prosodically. Quotation attributions are nearly always deaccented, appositions and non-restrictive relatives copy the pattern of the main phrase in a lower voice, some parentheticals are produced in a lower pitch range, while sentence adverbs do not show any tonal subordination at all.

On a closed set of English data, consisting of rising declaratives and outer-negation polar questions, we show some advantages of a pragmatic game-theoretical approach to the analysis of intonation, in particular an End Rise.