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Information Structure in Lesser-described Languages: Studies in prosody and syntax
Edited by Evangelia Adamou, Katharina Haude and Martine Vanhove
[Studies in Language Companion Series 199] 2018
► pp. 17–50

Chapter 2
Prosodic separation of postverbal material in Georgian

A corpus study on syntax-phonology interface

| Bielefeld University
| Goethe-University Frankfurt
| Tbilisi State University

A striking property of Georgian intonation is that focused postverbal material is prosodically separated from the core clause. The challenge of the present study is to assess the external validity of this experimental result by means of a corpus study. Corpus data is known to contain immense variability due to uncontrolled factors related to spontaneous speech production, such as segmental effects, intra-speaker variation, etc. The corpus study confirmed that the right edge of the verb is frequently associated with a prosodic boundary that separates the prosodic constituent encompassing the verb and the preverbal material from the postverbal domain. This boundary can be overwritten by information structure, in particular by postfocal dephrasing.

Article outline
  • 1.Assumptions about empirical data
  • 2.Georgian prosody and syntax
  • 3.External validity of experimental findings
  • 4.Corpus study: Method
    • 4.1Corpus
    • 4.2Data selection
    • 4.3Annotation and analysis
  • 5.Corpus results
    • 5.1Effects of word order
    • 5.2Effects of information structure
    • 5.3Effects of random factors
    • 5.4Statistical modelling
  • 6.Variability of scripted and spontaneous data
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.199.02sko
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