ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on factors affecting the Accentual Phrasing of an utterance, for two reasons. First, it is at the prosodic level that view of prosodic structure differs most from other proposals in which phrasing is based primarily based on the syntactic structure. Second, the factors affecting the accentual phrasing are the same as those affecting the Intonational Phrasing. The chapter discusses nonsyntactic factors affecting the Accentual Phrase: speech rate, phonological weight, focus and semantic weight. It also discusses the Accentual Phrasing patterns of phrasal compounds which are not always isomorphic to the syntactic structure of the compound. The chapter describes the relationship between Accentual Phrasing and syntactic structure and formulate a syntactic constraint on Accentual Phrasing that may be the source of the impression that phonological phrasing can be predicted almost entirely from the syntax. Focus has long been noticed by phonologists as a factor affecting the Phonological Phrasing as well as the Intonational Phrasing.
