| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation investigates nuclear accent placement across three spoken
discourse genres in Standard Southern British English (documentaries, TED Talks,
and interviews) with the aim of determining how canonical descriptions of tonicity
operate in authentic communicative contexts. Drawing on a corpus of 5,494
intonation phrases (IPs) and grounded in the British tradition of intonation, the study
examines (a) the extent to which the main trends in nucleus placement discussed in
the literature appear in the corpus, (b) how these three discourse genres differ in
tonicity, and (c) in what ways the deviations from the Last Lexical Item (LLI) Rule
observed in the corpus are associated with genre-specific discourse practices. The
findings reveal a strong overall dominance of the LLI Rule, yet they also demonstrate
that departures occur in highly systematic ways conditioned by genre. | es_ES |
