The appropriateness of prenuclear accent types – Evidence for information structural effects

Baumann, Stefan; Kalbertodt, Janina; Mertens, Jane

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2020-33

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Background elements can be considered to be least informative since they are already available in the discourse (generally being conflated with givenness at the level of information status). There is no (other) information structural concept which directly links these two levels of information status and focus which we claim to be a relevant semantic-pragmatic correlate of prosodic prominence (see also the usage of informativeness in Baumann et al 2019 andBaumann et al 2020). In the present paper, we are using informativeness to describe the effects of information status and contrast at a single level of analysis.…”

Section: Information Structure Informativeness and Prosodic Prominencementioning

confidence: 90%

The influence of informativeness on the prosody of sentence topics

Baumann

Mertens

Kalbertodt

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In a production experiment on German we investigated the prosodic effects of informativeness (comprising information status and type of focus domain) on sentence-initial referents, or sentence topics. While referents in sentence-final position usually receive the nuclear accent of the utterance, commonly defined as the last and information-structurally crucial pitch accent in an intonation unit, sentence topics often carry a prenuclear accent. However, the status of prenuclear accents is still unclear: Are they just ‘ornamental’ or do they express meaning differences? We expected to find a positive correlation between the informativeness of a sentence topic and its prosodic prominence but the hypothesis was only partly confirmed: Results show that informativeness does not affect the accent type of sentence-initial referents, as they are consistently marked by rising prenuclear accents, even on given items. Nevertheless, results show a subtle influence of information status: The newer the referent the wider the range and the steeper the accentual rise. The parameters intensity and word duration show a main effect of informativeness. Surprisingly, however, contrastive topics are mostly produced as prosodically less prominent, often as part of a flat hat pattern, possibly because the contrast has already been expressed by the parallel syntactic structure. We conclude that prenuclear accents are consistently placed for rhythmic reasons but that they are nevertheless affected by a referent’s information status, however subtle the influence might be. In this respect, prenuclear accents cannot be viewed as being just ‘ornamental’, as they do convey meaning differences.

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Section: Information Structure Informativeness and Prosodic Prominencementioning

confidence: 90%

The influence of informativeness on the prosody of sentence topics

Baumann

Mertens

Kalbertodt

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Very similar results have been found for TED Talk speakers [4] and other speaking styles that generally involve 'lively' speech, including the increased use of specific accent types (esp. L+H*) ( [55] for American English, [56] for German).…”

Section: R-given R-new L-new L-givenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boosting or inhibiting - how semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German

Baumann,

Lorenzen

2024

PLoS ONE

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In this exploratory study, we investigate the influence of several semantic-pragmatic and syntactic factors on prosodic prominence production in German, namely referential and lexical newness/givenness, grammatical role, and position of a referential target word within a sentence. Especially in terms of the probabilistic distribution of accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, deaccentuation) we find evidence for an additive influence of the discourse-related and syntactic cues, with lexical newness and initial sentence position showing the strongest boosting effects on a target word’s prosodic prominence. The relative strength of the initial position is found in nearly all prosodic factors investigated, both discrete (such as the choice of accent type) and gradient (e.g., scaling of the Tonal Center of Gravity and intensity). Nevertheless, the differentiation of prominence relations is information-structurally less important in the beginning of an utterance than near the end: The prominence of the final object relative to the surrounding elements, especially the verbal component, is decisive for the interpretation of the sentence. Thus, it seems that a speaker adjusts locally important prominence relations (object vs. verb in sentence-final position) in addition to a more global, rhythmically determined distribution of prosodic prominences across an utterance.

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“…Prenuclear pitch accents precede nuclear accents within the same intonation unit. The status of prenuclear pitch accents is still under-investigated: some scholars argue that these pitch accents are optional (Büring, 2007;Chodroff & Cole, 2018), they "may be used due to general principles of rhythmic organization and do not reliably mark information structural distinctions" (Calhoun, 2010, as cited in Bauman et al, 2020, p. 16); others assign more importance to the prenuclear pitch accents as they may contribute to the informativeness on phrase initial arguments (Baumann et al, 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

Observations on Basic Intonational Patterns of Questions and Statements in Standard Lithuanian

Kazlauskienė¹,

Dereškevičiūtė²

2022

StALan

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This paper discusses the results of the pilot study on intonational patterns of questions and statements in Lithuanian. Special attention is devoted to the tone changes at the end of the intonational phrase, i.e. to the boundary tone and the pitch accent of the last word. In order to identify the main patterns, a corpus of 96 tokens (statements, questions with wh-word ‘kada’ and yes/no questions with and without interrogative word ‘ar’ read by four speakers) has been examined. F0 measurements were extracted using Praat. The audio files were annotated based on the main principles of the autosegmental-metrical phonology: high tone is marked with H, low tone – L, pitch accent – ‘*’ and boundary tone – ‘%.’ In the perception experiment, the participants were asked to identify the statements and questions (the interrogative words were removed). 21 native speakers participated in the experiment.The results have shown that the end of the statements in Standard Lithuanian is described by low tones (L* L%), whereas questions can have tones as follows: high-low (HL* L%), low (L* L%) and low-high (LH* H%). The tone patterns at the end of the questions depend on the presence or absence of the interrogation word: wh- questions are characterized by low tones at the end of phrase (L *L%), yes/no questions with an interrogative word ‘ar’ may have low (L* L%) or rising tones (LH* H%), and yes/no questions without an interrogative word end in rising (LH* H%) or falling (HL* L%) tones. The patterns with low or falling tones are common for the questions with an interrogative word and (or) focus word in a non-final position of the phrase. The results of the perception experiment allow us to draw preliminary conclusions that the high boundary tone, the interrogative word and the pitch accent of the focused word are equivalent markers of a question in Lithuanian.

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The appropriateness of prenuclear accent types – Evidence for information structural effects

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

The influence of informativeness on the prosody of sentence topics

The influence of informativeness on the prosody of sentence topics

Boosting or inhibiting - how semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German

Observations on Basic Intonational Patterns of Questions and Statements in Standard Lithuanian

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