Analysis by synthesis of English intonation patterns: generalising from form to function

International audienceThis paper presents a general model for the relation between representations of form and function for speech prosody on a multilingual basis. It outlines a procedure for analysing prosody by synthesis applied to English intonation patterns, generating formal representations from a minimal representation of prosodic functions and comparing the output with the observed data. This then allows the functional representation to be enriched and tested to see whether it provides a closer fit to the data