Prosodic focus in English vs. French: A scope account

Abstract

We compare the use of prosodic prominence in English and French to convey focus. While previous studies have found these languages, and Germanic vs. Romance more generally, to differ in their use of prominence to encode focus (e.g., Ladd 1990;1996;Lambrecht 1994;Cruttenden 1997;, exactly what underlies the difference remains an open question. We investigate two possibilities: The difference between the languages could be due to a difference in their phonology, restricting the circumstances in which material can be prosodically reduced, as proposed in Féry (2014). Alternatively, there could be syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic differences concerning when prominence can be used to encode focus. We compare these hypotheses in a production study which varied the type of focus context (corrective, contrastive, parallelism) to establish the contextual conditions on when a shift in prosodic prominence can occur. The results confirm earlier claims that French uses prosodic prominence to encode focus in corrections, but fails to prosodically encode other types of focus, in contrast to English. We further find that French and English encode focus with very similar acoustic means. Our results show that both languages have the phonological/phonetic means to encode focus using prominence shifts, but differ with respect to the semantic and pragmatic circumstances in which they use them. We propose that these semantic/pragmatic differences between English and French are a result of differences in the syntactic scope possibilities of the focus operator involved in prosodic focus marking.

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

“…Our declarative examples can best be characterized as 'corrective focus' (cf. Ladd, 2008;Vander Klok et al, 2018). Our interrogative examples are similar, in that they involved echo questions, which are closely related to corrective focus in declaratives.…”

Acoustic Correlates of Focus Marking in Czech and Polish

“…According to Ladd (1990Ladd ( , 2008 the picture is somewhat more complex, in that languages actually differ in the types of foci they prosodically encode. Whenever the potential antecedent for focus marking is located within the same sentence, a type of focus that we subsequently refer to as "parallel focus," following vander Klok, Wagner, and Goad (2018), speakers of languages of Italian, for example, do not shift prominence to the constituent that would have been the potential focus (Ladd 2008). Cruttenden (1993Cruttenden ( , 2006 tested a variety of examples, including those that according to our characterization would be called cases of parallelism, and finds that in these types of examples speakers of French, Italian, Spanish and Tunisian Arabic fail both to deaccent given items and shift prominence to the contrasting one.…”

“…Vander Klok et al (2018) designed an experiment that directly compared French and English, looking at different types of focus, and controlling for word order by looking both at clefted and non-clefted constituents. With respect to different types of focus, they examine focus and givenness marking in four contexts, illustrated in (4) to (7).…”

“…To address how and in which contexts Polish and Czech mark focus, and to make our results comparable with those already available for French and English, we conducted two elicitation tasks following a design utilized by vander Klok et al (2018). We only looked at adjective-noun sequences and we added two conditions of our own, that is, focus as an answer to a wh-question and a coordinated focus condition.…”

“…In addition to the four conditions examined by vander Klok et al (2018), we included two additional conditions: information focus in (12), that is, focus as an answer to a wh-question, and coordinated focus in (13).…”