Structure and Intonation in Spoken Language Understanding

The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their traditional surface-syntactic structure. However, the notion of "intonational structure" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can be subsumed under a rather different notion of syntactic surface structure that emerges from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" extension to Categorial Grammar. Interpretations of constituents at this level are in turn directly related to "information structure", or discourse-related notions of "theme", "rheme", "focus" and "presupposition". Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems.