The Centrality of Metrical Structure in Signaling Information Structure: A Probabilistic Perspective

This article introduces a new way to explain how information structure is signaled prosodically in English. I claim that METRICAL STRUCTURE plays a central role (Ladd 2008, Truckenbrodt 1995). Information structure (defined as in Steedman 1991 and Vallduví the less prominent, the more likely a givenness reading. Both constructed and naturally occurring examples from the Switchboard corpus are used.