Prosody indisputedly affects the choice of syntactic constructions and the order of constituents within a sentence. However, for German, neither theories of grammar nor models of language production systematically incorporate prosodic influences on sentence structure. It is largely unclear which prosodic factors affect sentence construction in German, and how strong their influence is on grammatical encoding in spontaneous speech.

The aim of this project is to clarify which prosodic requirements have syntactic consequences at what stage of language production. We will use language production experiments and corpora of spontaneous speech to systematically study prosodic phenomena which may condition syntactic structure, operating beyond word boundaries. The phenomena under study cover essential parts of the prosodic hierarchy (intonation phrase, phonological phrase, word/foot). For each of these levels, we study their effect on a) the choice of syntactic construction, and b) on constituent ordering.

Specifically, we test the following hypotheses:

Based on the experimental and corpus data, we evaluate models of language production and grammar. Specifically, we review which stages of grammatical encoding are affected by which prosodic conditions and how strong the prosodic effects are in comparison to other relevant factors. Finally, we discuss a) to what extent the data can be explained in terms of grammatical constraints pertaining to the syntax-phonology interface and b) which role these constraint have in language production.