A syntax based grammar of stress sequences

The Spoken English Corpus (SEC) is a speech corpus containing prosodic and syntactic annotations and provides an ideal source for the study of the relationship between prosody and syntax. It is shown that the placement of stresses on words in an utterance may be largely predicted from word classifications. The language model used to make these predictions is inferred from the SEC training set. However, it is unlikely that the predictions will be 100% accurate since stress is also a function of context and semantics