Prosodic Structure, Performance Structure and Phrase Structure

It is natural to expect phrase structure to be important in predicting prosodic phrasing. Yet there appears to be a concensus that syntactic phrases do not correspond well to prosodic phrasing, and independent structures have been proposed to account for prosody. I propose that the problem with phrase structure lies with the particular measures of boundary strength applied to syntactic structures, and with the fact that phrase structure is viewed as an immediate constituency tree exclusively. I propose viewing phrase structure as a composite of immediate constituency and dependency relations, and present an alternative measure of boundary strength. I show that boundary strength according to this measure corresponds much more closely to empirical prosodic (and psycholinguistic) boundary strength than does syntactic boundary strength according to a standard measure.