On the capacity of different word classes to signal prosodic prominence
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2000 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Brno Studies in English 26 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | word classes; functional sentence perspective; intonation; prosodic prominence |
| Description | The paper is a study of the relation between the word-class status and the prosodic prominence of words in Czech and English. The study is based on an analysis of parallel Czech and English spoken texts. The most frequent word classes occurring in the material analyzed are verbs, pronouns, nouns, and adverbs. Within the group of nucleus-bearing words, the most frequently represented word classes are nouns and verbs. The capacity of different word classes to signal prosodic prominence is expressed by a coefficient based on the relation between the frequency of a word class within all words of the texts and its frequency within nucleus-bearing words. This coefficient is highest for English nouns (2.5), English adjectives (2.2) and Czech nouns (2.1). |