> (c) many of his examples sound to us as if they have contrastive stress.
>
>We assume that, with some practice, Mark would be able to modify the
>constrastive stress into ordinary nuclear, and that he'd be willing to put
>in the practice necessary, so we don;t see that as a major problem.
I can't let this one pass -- it was DELIBERATE in the cases where it
occurs, because I specified AGs containing 2 feet, which means either some
compound construction, or what you call "contrastive" stress. The same
2-foot structures can also be realised with "ordinary nuclear" stress, as
exemplars of 2-AG structures, each containing one foot.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why early nucleus should be a problem for you:
please enlighten! For me it is very interesting to include these
structures, as it allows me to investigate the domain of f0 patterns
related to pitch accents.
I'm not the best person to comment on the other problems so I won't. But I
do get nervous about encouraging speakers to use something other than their
normal, natural voices: something of the tail wagging the dog here, though
it may be the only way round things.
Jill xx