Summary: | "Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides evidence for each one from numerous languages. Prosodic Phonology also includes a chapter in which experimental psycholinguistic data support the proposed hierarchy. A perceptual study provides evidence that prosodic constituent structure - not syntactic constituent structure - predicts whether listeners are able to disambiguate different types of ambiguous sentences. A chapter on the phonology of poetic meter examines portions of Dante's Divine Comedy. It is demonstrated that the constituents proposed for spoken language also make interesting predictions about literary metrical patterns.
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