Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

This article explores a phenomenon of English in which out-combines with a predicate to form a complex predicate (e.g., outsing, outdo, outrun, outsmart, … ), here called "out-pred." A thorough investigation uncovers several new generalizations, which can be summarized as follows. (i) Out-pred formation is productive and syntactic, building upon the structure for the pred. (ii)Out-is the core of the out-pred clause's extended verbal projection. These findings are derived via an analysis in which out-merges with the pred before any argument(s) can merge. This analysis is then further supported by exploring domains in which out-pred is unavailable; though these are seemingly unrelated, they share deep derivational properties that are incompatible with the derivation of out-pred. The findings of this article have implications for the syntactic representation of argument structure more generally, supporting analyses where all arguments of a verb are syntactically severed from it.

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How directly the operation of phrasal stress placement refers to syntax is theory-dependent: directly in some (e.g., Truckenbrodt 1995, Kahnemuyipour 2009), indirectly in others (e.g., Chomsky & Halle 1968, Halle & Vergnaud 1987). Adequately evaluating this issue requires knowing both the relevant syntactic structure(s) as well as how syntax interacts with phonology-neither is trivial. This paper argues that syntax transparently feeds prosody at regular sub-intervals of structure building (e.g., Uriagereka 1999, Chomsky 2001), and the phrasal stress placement operation refers directly to syntactic hierarchy, without exception. As such, wherever the NSR's predictions are "incorrect", the syntactic representation must be amended (e.g., Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005). The major contribution of this work is not in its specific findings, but rather in its demonstration of a methodology by which phrasal stress data are used to understand syntax and not vice versa.

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