Note that most participants are auditors,
        so this seminar will be mostly a course-like reading group.

Initial questions for all of us:

What is “syntax”? What is “prosody”? How are they connected?

And what else is on the table?

1. Phonology
2. Semantics/pragmatics: Focus, “information structure”, anaphora, emphasis…
3. Phonetics and other aspects of speech performance (e.g. gesture-in-the-general-sense)
4. “Audience design”
5. Spontaneous speech production: message (text) / interaction / process

How much of all this is in which bucket?

     For example,

• Are Focus, Anaphora, etc. part of syntax?
• How much of prosodic “phrasing” is part of phonology?
• Which aspects of all this are “digital” and which are “analog” or gradient?

A crucial point: this is “performance”.

Not in the sense of “competence/performance” (though that too!)

      but in the sense that the basic data is speech communication in the real world.

We’re interested in the systems (linguistic and otherwise) that underlie this process
     but it would be a bad mistake to cut our inquiry off too quickly from the real world,

            because there are many open questions about what the underlying systems are
                and how they interact.

Possible (and actually suggested) answers to these questions are remarkably diverse.
The clouds of orthodox answers have drifted substantially over time --
      and these changes will continue.

So what is today’s reasonable “null hypothesis”? What are reliable ways to go further?

One interesting island in this conceptual ocean: Norvin Richards on the prosodic determination of WH-in-situ.

Participant introductions -- Initial questions for participants:

• Your background and interests
• What topics/questions about syntax and prosody are you interested in?
• Are there specific parts of the literature that you’d like to read and discuss?