No abstract

No abstract

Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. “too”) in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.

This paper reports the results of two identical experiments, one in Hindi and one in Indian English, that elicited semi-spontaneous sentences containing a focused agent or a focused patient. The primary aim of the experiments was to investigate the prosodic correlates of information structure in the two languages and to explain these correlates with a phonological model. The resulting phonological model proposes that focus is realized with enhanced correlates of phrasing and not with prominence, at least not of the same kind as languages using pitch accents. Secondary aims were to verify the ecological validity of similar data elicited with scripted speech (Patil et al. 2008) and to reflect on the place of Hindi and Indian English in a typology of intonation.

This paper discusses reduplication as a technique of word formation in German. In contrast to previous approaches, which consider reduplication as extra-grammatical and unproductive, this study identifies rhyme and ablaut reduplication as truly reduplicative processes in the morphology of German. A sizeable corpus of these reduplications and an acceptability rating study attest the productivity of this phenomenon. Other contemplable cases of reduplicative structures are properly treated as either phonological doubling, lexical sequencing, or (special cases of) compounding. An analysis in terms of Optimality Theory (OT) is offered which suggests that both rhyme and ablaut reduplication emerge when a segmentally and prosodically underspecified expressive morpheme is attached to a base -given that the base strictly obeys certain word prosodic requirements. The present approach considers the morphophonology to be blind to morphosyntactic structure and consequently eschews constraints that make explicit reference to base-reduplicant correspondence. The OT grammar successfully models the emergence of the fixed bipedal structure, the obligatory segmental deviance of the reduplicant, non-exponence of the expressive morpheme in the case of non-trochaic bases, the variable linearization of base and reduplicant in ablaut reduplication, and the interaction of reduplication with segmental alternations. Certain (crosslinguistic) correlations regarding constraints on reduplicative word formation and poetic devices, such as rhyme and meter, are discussed.