الفهرس 
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Abstract
The study addresses the syntactic-prosodic interface of focus in selected English narrative audiobooks. Given that prosody is the principal cue of marking information structure in English, there is a vast body of research that attempts to get a window into the information structure-prosody interface. Most of these accounts take a simplistic view and examine the prosody of focus divorced from syntax. The current study attempts to circumvent this problem and postulates that the prosodic encoding of focus is constrained by the syntactic configuration of the focus constituent. The basic hypothesis of the study is that focus is not invariantly realized and that it is predicted to exhibit prosodic variation that is syntactically driven. specifically, the study proposes two independent syntactic variables to determine whether they affect the prosodic encoding of focus. These variables are syntactic markedness and the syntactic domain of the focus constituent. The former has to do with whether focus is realized by the canonical word order, or deviates from it. The latter defines the syntactic constituent onto which focus is mapped, i.e. an argument, the predicate or the entire sentence. The focus constructions captured along each syntactic variable are submitted to prosodic analysis along a set of three dependent prosodic variables: prosodic prominence, tonal contour, and prosodic phrasing. To test these hypotheses, the data of our study consists three audiobooks: The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The research procedures applied in this study consist of three main steps. First, the written version of the corpus is annotated in terms of the two syntactic variables. Second, the audio files of the annotated examples are extracted using the MP3 Cutter program. Third, the extracted audio files are submitted to prosodic analysis using Praat Software. The results of the study have shown that unmarked focus constituents are predicted to be more prosodically prominent than marked variants and are more frequently associated with the H* pitch accent. Further, argument focus is more prominent than predicate and sentence focus and favours the L+H* pitch accent. Argument focus has been found to favour separate phrasing compared to predicate focus and sentence focus.
Keywords: Information structure, focus, syntactic-prosodic interface, prosody, syntactic markedness, syntactic domain, prosodic prominence, prosodic phrasing, tonal contour.