Dependencies over prosodic boundary tones in Spontaneous Spoken Hebrew

The aim of the present study is to investigate two aspects of speech: suprasegmental characteristics and syntagmatic relations. More specifically, it focused on the segmentation role of prosody and its interface with the syntagmatic sequence. While certain prosodic boundary tones seem to break speech into coherent syntactic structures, it was found that excessive elongated words are indeed prosodic breaks of various "strong" dependencies. Such a break is not due only to prosody or phonological rules, but can be attributed to the strength of syntactic relations (i.e. dependencies) between the elongated word and the word that precedes it, and between the elongated word and the following word. The findings suggest an encompassing approach to prosodysyntax interface which says that through the elongated boundaries phenomenon, speakers and listeners are exposed to the tension between the prosodic strata and the syntactic strata of language, i.e., between a prosodic break and syntactic continuity. This tension occurs about 10%-18% of spontaneous Israeli Hebrew boundary tones.