Thoughts on Prosodic Structure

International audienceOur ideas about prosodic representation are heavily influenced by our knowledge of written language. All writing systems represent utterances as a linear sequence of elements drawn from a fi nite set of characters. In many languages, special characters such as spaces or punctuation marks are used as boundary symbols. There is a general consensus today that utterances, although themselves produced, transmitted and perceived as a linear stream of (respectively) physiological, acoustic and perceptual events, are mentally represented as a prosodic structure in which smaller chunks of speech are grouped into larger chunks following a hierarchy of phonological levels, and that this hierarchy is only partially related to the more abstract syntactic structure. In this paper, I present and discuss some thoughts on the nature of these prosodic chunks and the ways in which prosodic structure differs both from written language and syntactic structure. I suggest, in particular, that a less linear approach to prosodic structure may lead to signifi cant and sometimes surprising insights into the nature of prosodic representations