What's new? : a semantic perspective on sentence accent

This paper proposes semantic definitions of the twin concepts of'given' and 'new' information, and shows how these definitions can be used to fill a gap in current theories of sentence accent. The semantic definitions proposed are based on a variant of Discourse Representation Theory in which the notion of an anaphoric relation is generalized beyond the case in which the denotation of the anaphor equals that of its antecedent. The resulting theory of sentence accent explains aspects of human speech production as well as understanding, and could be applied in automatic speech synthesis as well as, in principle, in automatic speech understanding.