Intonation in Text and Discourse: Beginnings

A printed text includes punctuation marks, capitalisation, paragraphs, headings and sub-headings to help the reader to understand how the words are organised into sentences, and sentences are organised into a coherent text. In a spoken text, this typographical information is absent. So how do readers and speakers provide equivalent information to the listener? <em>Intonation in Text and Discourse</em> describes the way in which speech melody, or intonation, is used to signal the structure of spoken texts, and it is the first text on discourse intonation to explore a wide variety of naturally-occurring spoken data.