Phonetics and Phonology of Thematic Contrast in German

Abstract

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or topic accent) is realized differently when signaling contrast than when not. In this article, the acoustic basis for the reported impressionistic differences is investigated in terms of the scaling (height) and alignment (positioning) of tonal targets. Subjects read target sentences in a contrastive and a noncontrastive context (Experiment 1). Prosodic annotation revealed that thematic accents were not realized with different accent types in the two contexts but acoustic comparison showed that themes in contrastive context exhibited a higher and later peak. The alignment and scaling of accents can hence be controlled in a linguistically meaningful way, which has implications for intonational phonology. In Experiment 2, nonlinguists' perception of a subset of the production data was assessed. They had to choose whether, in a contrastive context, the presumed contrastive or noncontrastive realization of a sentence was more appropriate. For some sentence pairs only, subjects had a clear preference. For Experiment 3, a group of linguists annotated the thematic accents of the contrastive and noncontrastive versions of the same data as used in Experiment 2. There was considerable disagreement in labels, but different accent types were consistently used when the two versions differed strongly in F0 excursion. Although themes in contrastive contexts were clearly produced differently than themes in noncontrastive contexts, this difference is not easily perceived or annotated.

Information status marking in spontaneous vs. read speech in story-telling tasks – Evidence from intonation analysis using GToBI

“…In this context it is also interesting to note that previous studies on German have found similar patterns: Braun (2006) reports that speakers produced mainly (! )H +L* nuclear accents in her reading experiment.…”

“…While the agreement on the presence or absence of a pitch accent was reasonable (81% in the English study, 87% in the German study), agreement on the type of pitch accent was much lower (64% in the ToBI experiment and only 51% in the GToBI experiment). Considerable inconsistency is also reported by Braun (2006), who asked trained labellers to annotate topical referents in German sentences choosing only among the three accents H*, L+H*, and L*+H.…”

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

“…It consists of two accents, the first one rising, the second one falling, and a high pitch between the two ( Figure 1a). This contour is an instance of an intonational ''false friend'' (same form but different function across languages): it has been described as a neutral intonation contour for Dutch (Cohen & 't Hart, 1967;'t Hart, Collier, & Cohen, 1990), but is associated with contrast in German (e.g., Braun, 2005Braun, , 2006Büring, 1997;Krifka, 1998;Mehlhorn, 2001;Steube, 2001;Wunderlich, 1991). This difference in the marking of intonational meaning is especially striking, since Dutch and German are two closely related Western Germanic languages.…”

Pointed and plateau-shaped pitch accents in North Frisian

“…If the same F 0 maximum value occurred two or more times within a high F 0 section, which happened in only 9 (i.e., 4.8%) of our 186 tokens, then we applied a common method and defined the first value as the peak maximum (e.g., Braun 2005). Note that the rising and falling F 0 ranges were not calculated with reference to the F 0 -peak maximum.…”