Conclusions

Abstract

Of the three phenomena examined in this study—declination, fall-rise patterns and blocking—all share a commonality in their capacity to be influenced by constraints on the speaker’s domains of syntactic coding. In the case of declination, it was observed in Chapter 2 that the topline function typically resets to a new high starting value at a major boundary between clauses of at least moderate length. Moreover, an analysis of pauses at the major boundary suggested that this resetting was triggered by the presence of the syntactic boundary rather than by an intermediary influence of a breath pause. The speaker’s domain of programming for declination thus seems to be defined, in part, in terms of a major syntactic constituent. In short utterances, this domain encompasses the entire sentence; in longer utterances, it typically corresponds to the main clause. While the domain of application for declination is largely dependent on the speaker’s syntactic coding, other factors, including speaking rate and constituent length, also probably exert some influence.