A grammatical component for a text-to-speech system

A grammatical component to supply information to a text-to-speech system is presented. It is composed of four modules: a lexicon, a morphological recognizer, a syntactic preanalyzer, a parser. The parser is composed of a bottom-up algorithm implementing a context-free grammar for Italian simply as Recursive Transition Networks (RTN). No conditions are introduced on the arcs: this will constitute the topic of future work. The paper deals extensively with Focontours and focus assignment rules in Italian by introducing Pierrehumbert´s notational system [4]. We found that an Fopeak usually obtains in coincidence with the focussed syllable: this may be either realized as a fall or as a rise followed or preceded by a trailing/leading Fomovement in the opposite direction. The combination of the two tones High/Low and Low/High can appear also on other constituents - Phonological Words - but the steepness of the jump or dipping is remarkably inferior to the one occurring in focussed constituents.