Different parts of the same elephant: a roadmap to disentangle and connect different perspectives on prosodic prominence

Abstract

Prosodic prominence is an umbrella term encompassing various related but conceptually and functionally different phenomena such as phonological stress, paralinguistic emphasis, lexical, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic salience, to mention a few. Due to the high interest prominence has received from various disciplines, it has been studied from multiple perspectives (functional, physical, cognitive). It also has been operationalised and annotated across different descriptive levels (syllable, word), based on different scales (categorical, multi-level, continuous), and measured across a large variety of signal domains (acoustic, articulatory, gestural). The present paper offers an overview of the various perspectives involved and defines a preliminary roadmap for a better and more unified understanding of this multi-faceted phenomenon.