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A second-occurrence (SO) focus is the semantic focus of a focus-sensitive operator (e.g. only), but is a repeat of anearlier focused occurrence. We report onthe first systematic productionan d perception experiments to show that SO foci occurring after a nuclear accent are, as Rooth (1996b) has claimed, prosodically marked. We find that (i) there is no mean pitch rise on SO foci, (ii) SO foci are marked by longer duration and greater energy, and (iii) listeners are able to detect the difference between SO foci and nonfoci. On the basis of these results, we argue that SO focus is compatible with theories of focus interpretationthat it has beenclaimed to contradict.

If language users are rational, they might choose to structure their utterances so as to optimize communicative properties. In particular, information-theoretic and psycholinguistic considerations suggest that this may include maximizing the uniformity of information density in an utterance. We investigate this possibility in the context of syntactic reduction, where the speaker has the option of either marking a higher-order unit (a phrase) with an extra word, or leaving it unmarked. We demonstrate that speakers are more likely to reduce less information-dense phrases. In a second step, we combine a stochastic model of structured utterance production with a logistic-regression model of syntactic reduction to study which types of cues speakers employ when estimating the predictability of upcoming elements. We demonstrate that the trend toward predictability-sensitive syntactic reduction (Jaeger, 2006) is robust in the face of a wide variety of control variables, and present evidence that speakers use both surface and structural cues for predictability estimation.1 P (wi|w1···wi−1) ] k with k > 1) is minimized when information density is uniform (for

AbstractA diverse set of empirical findings indicate that word predictability in context influences the fine-grained details of both speech production and comprehension. In particular, lower predictability relative to similar competitors tends to be associated with phonetic enhancement, while higher predictability is associated with phonetic reduction. We review evidence that these in-the-moment biases can shift the prototypical pronunciations of individual lexical items, and that over time, these shifts can promote larger-scale phonological changes such as phoneme mergers. We argue that predictability-associated enhancement and reduction effects are based on predictability at the level of meaning-bearing units (such as words) rather than at sublexical levels (such as segments) and present preliminary typological evidence in support of this view. Based on these arguments, we introduce a Bayesian framework that helps generate testable predictions about the type of enhancement and reduction patterns that are more probable in a given language.

sixty-fifth birthday coincides with the completion of the paper. Professor Rohdenburg's seminal studies on English usage and structure have been an inspiration to many data-oriented students of language, ourselves included. We received help and advice on this work from many people. Paul Fontes did essential work on the maximum entropy predictability model described at the end of section 3. Sandy Thompson was generous in sharing an early version of Fox and Thompson (in press) with us, and in giving us very useful feedback on earlier versions of this work.