THE PARSING OF PROSODY

Prosody has been demonstrated to play some role in parsing the grammat ical structure of utterances of texts that might otherwise display sur face (syntactic) ambiguity. In the context of this research, it is imp ortant 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. Fir st, prosodic categories that determine or are marked by the intonation al pattern are described for English and Japanese, concentrating on th e categories ''pitch accent'' and tonally marked ''phrases'' at levels of the prosodic hierarchy above the (prosodic) word. Then various pot ential ambiguities in parsing these categories are discussed, with att ention to both the phonological and the phonetic contexts which are mo st conducive to ambiguity between alternative prosodic parses, and to the implications of these ambiguities for claims about the relationshi p between prosody and syntax.