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The prosody of non-assertive speech acts other than questions is rather underexplored. Very little is known about the role of information structure in non-assertive speech acts in general. The present study presents two production experiments examining the prosody of string-identical verb-second (experiment 1) and verb-final (experiment 2) wh-exclamatives and wh-questions in German in relation to their status as different speech acts, in relation to their sensitivity to information structure, and in relation to speaker sex. The study shows that the two speech acts are differentiated by many prosodic means, both globally (duration, intonation contour) and locally (accent distribution in the clause-initial and clause-final regions; pitch, duration, intensity on various elements in the clause, especially the subject pronoun and the direct object, which are more prominent in exclamatives, and the verb-second auxiliary, which is more prominent in questions). Exclamatives overall show a very rigid prosodic contour; they typically are realized with an accent on the subject pronoun and on the object and end in a fall. Questions are much more flexible; they are realized as rises or falls, and show a more varied accent structure in the clause-initial and clause-final regions. Both speech acts show information-structural effects of givenness marking, but the effects in exclamatives are remarkably weak. It is proposed that the speech-act marking prosody overrides information-structural effects to some extent. Male and female speakers show differences in their preferred accent patterns for the two speech acts. Some acoustic differences are only reliable for female speakers.

This paper argues that modal particles, illocutionary negation as expressed by the operator FALSUM, and the operator VERUM are common-ground managing operators, which indicate the status of a proposition relative to the common ground (newness, expectedness, speaker commitment etc.). Common-ground managing operators can influence the truthconditional meaning of a proposition. This is shown in detail for the scopal interaction of negation and epistemic modal verbs in German. The observed effects are argued to be due to (i) the negative marker denoting either propositional negation or the operator FALSUM, and (ii) common-ground managing operators determining to a large degree the discourse appropriateness of the utterance they occur in.

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This article critically evaluates the notion of contrast and discusses the role that contrast has been claimed to have in grammar. It argues that a precise understanding of grammatical effects of contrast can only be gained if both the contrastive constituents with the kind of alternative set they evoke as well as the discourse relations that connect the discourse segments containing the contrastive constituents are subjected to detailed analysis for their effects on grammar (prosody, morphosyntax). It presents three hypotheses specifying the details for the identification of (a) contrast-related alternative formation, (b) contrastive discourse relations, and (c) grammatical manifestations of contrast. It reviews previous research on contrast in relation to these hypotheses, examining the linguistic materials that have been used to elicit grammatical manifestations of contrast, and discussing specific findings for particular languages from the prosodic and the morphosyntactic literature on contrast.

The paper shows that in gapping sentences where a negative marker in the first conjunct takes wide scope over the whole coordination, the negation obligatorily operates on the level of the speech act rather than on the level of the proposition. In assertions, this is denial negation, and in questions, outer negation. The negation operating on the level of the speech act is argued to be an instantiation of the degrees of strength that are associated with the sincerity conditions of a speech act, which is a feature that it shares with VERUM focus and certain epistemic adverbs. Syntactically, this negation is situated higher than propositional negation, viz. in the CP of the clause. This suggests that gapping with wide scope negation is fundamentally different from 'ordinary' gapping which always involves propositional negation.

We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of German sentences with a leftdislocated subject vs. object: (i) a rising accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a rising-falling hat contour on the main clause; (ii) a falling accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a falling accent plus subsequent deaccentuation. The contours had differential effects depending on the grammatical function of the dislocated phrase (subject/object) and, for the recall, on the cue type for the recall (subject/object), in certain conditions overriding the subject-before-object preference normally found in processing. To account for the findings, we propose: (1) Contour (i) signals the topic status of the referent of the dislocated phrase. Contour (ii) signals that referent's focus status.(2) Topics are referents that serve as an address in a structured discourse representation in working memory under which information about that referent is stored.(3) Subjects are default topics, whereas objects are not, so that topic-marking an object is motivated, which results in an object-before-subject preference for sentences with topical objects during processing. (4) Retrieval of information from an address incurs a lower processing load if the appropriate address is cued than if some other referent is cued.