Intonational Means to Mark Verum Focus in German and French

Abstract

German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French--owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity of an utterance in the two languages (e.g. the child IS tearing the banknote as an opposite claim to the child is not tearing the banknote). When Verum Focus applies to auxiliaries, pragmatic aspects (i.e. highlighting the contrast) directly compete with structural constraints (e.g. avoiding an accent on phonologically weak elements such as monosyllabic function words). Intonational analyses showed that auxiliaries were predominantly accented in German, as expected. Interestingly, we found a high number of (as yet undocumented) focal accents on phrase-initial auxiliaries in French Verum Focus contexts. When French accent patterns were equally distributed across information structural contexts, relative prominence (in terms of peak height) between initial and final accents was shifted towards initial accents in Verum Focus compared to non-Verum Focus contexts. Our data hence suggest that French also may mark Verum Focus by focal accents but that this tendency is partly overridden by strong structural constraints.

Prosodic and lexical marking of contrast in L2 Italian

“…Klein 1998Klein , 2006. In other words, verb type seems to matter more than finiteness and assertion, a situation similar to what we found for French (Turco et al, 2013). From a typological perspective, our data strongly support prior findings that polarity contrast is not as consistently encoded in Italian as in German or Dutch (Turco et al, 2014).…”

“…Féry & Samek-Lodovici, 2006). Similar findings were also found for polarity-switch contexts in French: In more than 40% of analytical verb forms, French speakers realised initial accents on the first syllable of the non-finite verb along with deaccented object nouns, a realisation that was not observed in contexts without switch on the polarity (Turco et al, 2013). …”

“…! 13 acting as controls (for a more detailed description, see Turco et al, 2014;Turco et al, 2013). This comparison allowed us to determine whether certain realisations are specific to polarity contrast or whether they are used in any contrastive condition.…”

“…Turco, Dimroth, & Braun, 2013;Turco, Gubian, & Schertz, 2011). Previous experiments have provided a first set of data on how contexts with a switch on the polarity comparable to the ones described above are verbalised in Italian (Dimroth et al, 2010;Turco et al, 2011).…”

Additive Linking in Second Language Discourse: Lexical, Syntactic and Discourse Organizational Choices in Intermediate and Advanced Learners of L2 German with L1 French

“…We will consider the fi ndings in more detail here, since the three studies are based 9. Like the entity-based orientation of French, the assertion-based orientation of German does not only aff ect additive markings, but also shows up very clearly in contrastive contexts (Dimroth et al, 2010;Benazzo et al, 2012;Turco et al, 2013).…”