The prosodic phrasing of clause-final prepositional phrases

Spoken language is not produced in a continuous flow; it is broken up into phrases. An understanding of phrase-boundary placement is critical for comp rehension and of great importance in text-to-speech technology. The knowled ge that speakers use to determine phrasal boundaries has been attributed in the literature to many seemingly competing factors, syntactic, semantic, p honological, discourse, and pragmatic. This article reports on a study of t he boundaries of a single type of data, clause-final prepositional phrases (PPs). The study was done to improve the phrasing of a text-to-speech synth esizer. The syntactic constituency of the PP and its length as measured in accented syllables account for an overwhelming majority of the data. The fe w exceptions to this account fall into natural categories of semantics, dis course, and pragmatics, which suggests they have the status of marked forms .*.