Prosodic Boundaries as Windows into Speech Planning: Timing, Meaning, and the Role of Focus

Prosodic boundaries are systematically marked through temporal modulations in articulation, most prominently phrase-final (pre-boundary) lengthening. While this phenomenon is widely attested and often treated as a universal marker of prosodic structure, its scope and functional basis remain poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear whether boundary-related timing reflects fixed grammatical domains, local temporal intervals, or more general properties of speech planning.

In this talk, I present articulatory evidence from Greek, Tokyo Japanese, and Seoul Korean, as well as acoustic evidence from Lesbian Greek, showing that the scope of phrase-final lengthening is not tied to a single domain or fixed interval. Instead, it is systematically sensitive to those prosodic dimensions that encode word-sized conceptual units in each language. These findings suggest that boundary-related timing reflects how speakers organize and coordinate meaning during speech planning. Building on this account, I then turn to focus as a test case for how information structure interacts with prosodic timing. Drawing on articulatory data from American English, Seoul Korean, and Taiwan Mandarin, as well as acoustic evidence from Yami (Tao), I show that focus is not a binary distinction, but a hierarchically structured system that is encoded through graded articulatory strengthening. Crucially, focus also reshapes the temporal organization of the phrase, modulating the extent of phrase-final lengthening and, in some cases, inducing reorganization of prosodic phrasing, such as dephrasing.

I argue that these patterns are best understood within a unified framework in which prosodic timing emerges from the coordination of nested rhythmic cycles during speech planning. On this view, the Intonational Phrase is temporally organized with respect to meaning, with focus defining the anchor of the IP-level cycle. Phrase-final lengthening then reflects how this cycle unfolds toward its terminal phase, rather than a fixed edge-based effect.

Location: Kaplan Hall A65