Marianne Mithun is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her work specializes in the following areas: morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, and their interrelations; language contact and language change; typology and universals; language documentation; American Indian and Austronesian linguistics.

She has published very extensively since the 1970s. As an example only, in 1999 she published a comprehensive overview book of Native American languages in Cambridge University Press, which won in 2002 the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, awarded annually by the Linguistic Society of America for the best book in linguistics.

Mithun has taught at many institutions around the world and was awarded Honorary (Honoris Causa) Doctorates in 2003 by La Trobe University in Melbourne and in 2000 by the University of Oslo.

Among her many academic positions, Mithun has been the founding President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (1983-1985), and the President of the Association for Linguistic Typology (1999-2003), the Societas Linguistica Europaea (2014- 2015) and at present the President of the LSA, as of 2020.

Mithun and her late husband, Prof. Wallace Chafe, established and directed The Wallace Chafe and Marianne Mithun Fund for Research on Understudied Languages, providing support for graduate students involved in language documentation projects.

ABSTRACT

PROSODIC STRUCTURE AND THE PACKAGING OF INFORMATION.

Work on language structure has traditionally focused on phonology, morphology, and syntax, each an essential building block of language. A domain that has received less attention is prosodic structure. Until relatively recently, tools for prosodic analysis were less accessible, but we are now in a position to document the ways in which speakers use such features in spontaneous speech, and to compare the patterns we find across languages. Some prosodic patterns appear in language after language, but others differ in interesting ways from one language to the next. Speakers of all languages package information in intonation units in the sense defined by Chafe, characterized by a single, coherent pitch contour. Units defined by pitch often but not always show additional features involving pausing, rhythm, intensity, and phonation type. In English, intonation units typically begin with a pitch reset followed by declination. Series of intonation units can form larger prosodic sentences, showing an overall declination in pitch, often with intermediate pitch resets at the beginning of each unit. Prosodic structure, like syntactic structure, is conventionalized to a certain extent, and the two often work in concert, but they do not necessarily coincide. Furthermore they can vary across speakers, genres, and, importantly, languages. And each can convey distinctions the other does not. As described by Chafe, intonation units in all languages tend to convey one new idea or focus of consciousness. But prosodic structure can also play a powerful role in conveying discourse and information structure. As will be seen, it is here that languages can differ.