When contrasting polarity, the Dutch use particles, Germans intonation

Abstract

This study compares how Dutch and German, two closely related languages, signal a shift from a negative to a positive polarity in two contexts, when contrasting the polarity relative to a different topic situation (In my picture the man washes the car following after In my picture the man does not wash the car, henceforth polarity contrast) and when correcting the polarity of a proposition (The man washes the car following after The man does not wash the car, henceforth polarity correction). Production data show that in both contexts German speakers produced Verum focus (i.e., a high-falling pitch accent on the finite verb), while Dutch speakers mostly used the accented affirmative particle wel. This shows that even lexically and syntactically close languages behave differently when it comes to signalling certain pragmatic functions. Furthermore, we found that in polarity correction contexts, both affirmative particles and Verum focus were realized with stronger prosodic prominence. This difference was found in both languages and might be due to a secondary (syntagmatic) effect of the information structure of the utterance (absence or presence of a contrastive topic)

Prosodic and lexical marking of contrast in L2 Italian

“…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). Further evidence on the minor relevance of polarity contrast in Italian is provided by the few occurrences of the sentence-initial adverb invece.…”

“…! 33 expressing polarity contrast lexically, as is done in Dutch (Turco et al, 2014). Similarly, L1 transfer may account for the high occurrence of verum focus accents produced by German non-native speakers when compared to the Italian and the Dutch group, thus mirroring what German natives do in comparable contexts (Turco et al, 2014).…”

“…! 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.…”

“…a focus on the polarity of an utterance in contexts where speakers assert a claim that was previously denied (e.g., The child ate the candies following after The child did not eat the candies). Recent empirical studies (Dimroth, Andorno, Benazzo, & Verhagen, 2010;Turco, Braun, & Dimroth, 2014) have revealed that focusing affirmative polarity plays a crucial role for common ground management 2 (Krifka & Musan, 2012) 1 In this paper we adopt the term contrast and treat it interchangeably with that of focus. Solving the long-standing theoretical definitional problems concerning these two notions would go beyond the scope of this paper.…”

“…7 attention to a change in polarity (see Turco et al, 2011 for a first data-driven investigation). For a direct comparison to the findings reported for German and Dutch speakers in Turco et al (2014), we adopt the picture-difference task here as well (Experiment 1). Given that the intonational phonology of Italian strongly varies across dialects (see D'Imperio, 2002 and references therein), we restrict our investigation to one regional variety, the one spoken in Rome.…”