At the beginning of the book I proposed that the phenomena of intonation can be understood as involving two essentially orthogonal dimensions, which I referred to as ‘pitch’ and ‘prominence/phrasing’. In the preceding three chapters we have considered in some detail various aspects of the description of pitch patterns. In this and the remaining two chapters we now go on to discuss the treatment of prominence and phrasing in an AM theory of intonation. Roughly speaking, in this chapter we consider the relations between sentence-level prominence (or sentence stress) and focus – which words in a sentence are prominent and why; and in the next we consider the specifically phonological aspects of sentence-level prominence. In the final chapter we discuss prosodic phrasing. By the end of the book I hope to have motivated the basic division of intonation into pitch and prominence/phrasing, and in particular to have shown why it is appropriate to regard ‘prominence’ as just one of several phenomena that can be accounted for by an adequate ‘metrical’ theory of prosodic structure.

Sentence stress and broad focus

It is now generally accepted that the pattern of sentence stress in an utterance reflects the utterance's intended focus, but there is a good deal of disagreement and confusion about just how it does this, and about what ‘focus’ actually involves.