ISCA Archive ExLing 2006
ISCA Archive ExLing 2006

Prosodic emphasis versus word order in Greek instructive texts

Christina Alexandris, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea

In Greek instructive texts, the production of clear and precise instructions is achieved by both prosodic modelling (Alexandris, Fotinea & Efthimiou, 2005) and morphosyntactic strategies (Alexandris, 2005). In the set of experiments performed in the present study, we attempt to determine whether prosodic modelling or whether morphosyntactic strategies, namely word order, constitutes the most crucial factor in the production of Greek spoken instructions most clearly and correctly understood by the receiver. In the present set of experiments, emphasis will be given in respect to utterances containing temporal expressions. The set of experiments performed in the present study involves the contrastive comparison and evaluation of 36 written and spoken utterances containing the temporal expressions, placed in different syntactic positions.