Intonation of Contrastive Topic in Estonian

Abstract

Contrastive topic is an information structural category that is usually associated with a specific intonation, which tends to be similar across languages (a rising pitch accent). The aim of the present study is to examine whether this also true of Estonian. Three potential prosodic correlates of contrastive topics are examined: marking with a particular pitch accent type, an emphatic realization of the pitch accent, and a following prosodic boundary. With respect to pitch accent types, it is found that only two subjects out of eight distinguish sentences with a contrastive topic from other types of information structure; the contour bears resemblance to contrastive topic intonation in other languages (consisting of an H* accent on the contrastive topic and an HL* accent on the focus), but is not restricted to sentences with contrastive topics. A more consistent correlate turns out to be an emphatic realization of the pitch accent carried by the contrastive topic constituent. No evidence is found of a tendency to produce contrastive topics as separate prosodic phrases.

Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

“…Also with this manipulation, when postboundary words were new, the focus was corrective, whereas when the postboundary words were given, the focus was informational. However, from previous studies (Baumann et al, 2007;Hanssen et al, 2008;He et al, 2011;House and Sityaev, 2003;Hwang, 2012;Katz and Selkirk, 2011;Kügler and Ganzel, 2014;Sahkai et al, 2013), no systematic acoustic difference was found between information and corrective focus. Thus, the differences between the given and new conditions, if any were found, would be evidence that newness is encoded in intonation.…”

The perception of prominence: a Rapid Prosody Transcription study with Estonian listeners

“…Thus, based on speech production, it is reasonable to expect that signal-based acoustic cues such as duration and F0 are also available for prominence perception in Estonian. Sahkai et al (2013b) also show that words in focus carry pitch accents. A perception experiment in Salveste (2013) that investigated the effect of word order and the position of pitch accents on congruency judgements in Estonian found that it was the position of the nuclear pitch accent that had the strongest effect.…”

“…Estonian makes it possible to investigate the abstract semanticosyntactic cues weighted against the signal-based and phonological cues to prominence because the few earlier studies have also indicated that Estonian employs pitch accents in a functional way (see Sahkai et al 2013ab, Salveste 2015, and Ots 2017. For example, Sahkai et al (2013b) found in a production study that different types of focus had an effect on word duration. Additionally, Ots (2017) showed that F0 change across the word was greater in focused than in unfocused words.…”

Information structural effects in processing contrastive ellipsis: Eye-tracking evidence from a flexible word order language

“…The possible responses in Example (10) share a contrastive accent on the CT subject ('Mari') and on the focused object ('book'), with the rest of the lexical material prosodically deaccented. While the exact syntactic position of CTs in the left periphery of Estonian is still a matter of debate (see discussion in Sahkai & Tamm 2018, Holmberg et al 2020, Kaps 2020, Vihman & Walkden 2021, for the sake of simplicity, I assume that there is a clause-initial left-peripheral landing position for CTs, a CT phrase projection (CTopP). 6 This is schematised in Example (11), where CTopP acts as a landing position for CTs, and GivenP can optionally host discourse-given material in the presence of a CT, such as a subject or non-focused adverb.…”