Prosodic and Semantic Properties of Intonational Phrases

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relation between prosodic and semantic properties of Intonational Phrases, based on the facts from Serbian. The production tests and elicited judgements show that the prosodic integration of the embedded IPs (appositives, parentheticals, and the left-peripheral adverbs) has a distinct semantic effect, or is accompanied by the narrow focus interpretation within the proposition modified.

Keywords

• conventional implicature
• focus
• intonational phrase
• prosodic integration