In a production experiment on German we investigated the prosodic effects of informativeness (comprising information status and type of focus domain) on sentence-initial referents, or sentence topics. While referents in sentence-final position usually receive the nuclear accent of the utterance, commonly defined as the last and information-structurally crucial pitch accent in an intonation unit, sentence topics often carry a prenuclear accent. However, the status of prenuclear accents is still unclear: Are they just ‘ornamental’ or do they express meaning differences? We expected to find a positive correlation between the informativeness of a sentence topic and its prosodic prominence but the hypothesis was only partly confirmed: Results show that informativeness does not affect the accent type of sentence-initial referents, as they are consistently marked by rising prenuclear accents, even on given items. Nevertheless, results show a subtle influence of information status: The newer the referent the wider the range and the steeper the accentual rise. The parameters intensity and word duration show a main effect of informativeness. Surprisingly, however, contrastive topics are mostly produced as prosodically less prominent, often as part of a flat hat pattern, possibly because the contrast has already been expressed by the parallel syntactic structure. We conclude that prenuclear accents are consistently placed for rhythmic reasons but that they are nevertheless affected by a referent’s information status, however subtle the influence might be. In this respect, prenuclear accents cannot be viewed as being just ‘ornamental’, as they do convey meaning differences.
This paper shows how the Rapid Prosody Transcription method (RPT, cp. Cole & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2016) can be utilized when investigating the prosodic systems of a little-described language. We report the results of a set of perception experiments on the prosody of Papuan Malay, which support the claim made in earlier (production) studies that Malayic varieties appear to lack stress (i.e., lexical stress as well as post-lexical pitch accents). We show that interrater agreement of speakers of Papuan Malay is much lower for prosodic prominences than for boundaries when rating their native language. However, they show higher agreement when asked to rate prominences in German. Most importantly, they seem to make use of the same acoustic cues as a German control group. We therefore conclude that while Papuan Malay indeed seems to lack post-lexical pitch accents, speakers of Papuan Malay appear to be able to perceive the accentual prominences characteristic of German.
In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punctuation is said to correlate with prosodic phrasing. With RD and AT clearly differing in discourse function (comment-topic structuring vs. disambiguation) and punctuation (comma vs. full stop), critical items in this study were manipulated with regard to the (mis-)match of these parameters. Since RD and AT are said to prosodically differ in pitch range, phrasing, and accentuation patterns, we measured the reduction of pitch range, boundary strength and prominence level. Results show an effect of both punctuation and discourse context (mediated by syntax) on phrasing and accentuation. Interestingly, for pitch range reduction no difference between RDs and ATs could be observed. Our results corroborate a language architecture model in which punctuation, prosody, syntax, and discourse-semantics are independent but interacting domains with correspondence constraints between them. Our findings suggest there are tight correspondence constraints between (i) punctuation (full stop and comma in particular) and syntax, (ii) prosody and syntax as well as (iii) prosody and discourse-semantics.
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