Intonation in Text and Discourse: Beginnings, Middles and Ends

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? Intonation in Text and Discourse 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.