Contrast and accent in Dutch and Romanian

Abstract

The impact of various contrast relations on accent distribution is still unclear. The literature suggests that there are at least three factors that are potentially important for the connection between contrast and accent, namely (1) whether a certain word is in contrast with a word which follows or precedes the current one, (2) what the syntactic status is of the contrastive element, and (3) whether the contrast relation holds within a sentence or across sentence boundaries. Additionally, there are major differences between languages, where it has for instance been shown that Romance languages under certain syntactic conditions resist deaccentuation much more in contrastive settings than Germanic languages. To address issues presented above, we recorded semi-spontaneous speech data (monologues) from 10 native speakers each of Dutch and Romanian, using the same elicitation paradigm. The materials were constructed such that either the adjective or the noun would be in contrast with a preceding or following word, the word would occur in an NP in object or subject position, and the contrast could be within a sentence or across a sentence boundary. Results on accent distribution in these elicited data reveal that different contrast relations have a significant impact on accent distribution in the Dutch utterances. In Romanian, accent distribution seems to serve a demarcative rather than a contrastive function.