Does pragmatic beat syntax? Evidence from focus accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech of Italian learners of German

Barbara Vogt,Peter Paschke

doi:10.13092/lo.93.4554

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German. We analyze two different contexts with non-final focus accents, i. e. narrow and broad focus contexts, mainly on sentence level while most studies discussing post-focal de-accentuation are restricted to noun phrases. For Italian learners, non-final placement of focus accents is likely to cause problems, given that in their L1, phonetic prominence is normally as-signed to the last constituent in the verbal phrase. Our initial hypothesis was that the hypothetical "cognitive universal" requiring de-accentuation of given elements might probably guide the learners in realizing the correct pitch contour in contexts with a non-final narrow focus (and pragmatic de-accentuation of the final given constituent). By contrast, the de-accentuation of phrase-final lexical verbs in broad focus contexts was expected to cause more problems given that this typologically marked syntactic structure does not exist in Italian. However, in a previous study based on read speech, de-accentuation of final given elements was managed by inter-mediate Italian learners of German L2 only slightly better than realizing a non-final focus accent in all new contexts on the argument in OV structures (success rate of 55% vs. 48%, with no statistically significant difference). In other words, both types of non-final focus accents seem to be balanced at this intermediate stage of acquisition. In this contribution, our goal is to discover whether in semi-spontaneous speech one can find the same distributional patterns of non-final focus accents in this learner variety of Italian learners of German. To this end, we analyzed recordings of oral exams from the same 10 Italian university students that had taken part in the previous study. The analysis shows that in semi-spontaneous speech production too, there is evidence for the hypothesis that pragmatics does not "beat" syntax in prosodic acquisition. Besides, when the two different data types were compared, a very high intra-speaker correlation emerged between read and semi-spontaneous speech.

Highlights

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German
Italian and German are subject to typological variation regarding a) the type of elements eligible to function as focus exponent (FE), that is the role of syntactic representation in assigning prominence4 and b) the interaction with pragmatic factors relating to information structure
Over the last years, growing cross-linguistic evidence suggests that learners of a foreign language start with a phrase-final focus accent and highlight the last content word in a phrase

Summary

Introduction

We investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German. In a previous study based on read speech, de-accentuation of final given elements was managed by intermediate Italian learners of German L2 only slightly better than realizing a non-final focus accent in all new contexts on the argument in OV structures (success rate of 55% vs 48%, with no statistically significant difference) In other words, both types of non-final focus accents seem to be balanced at this intermediate stage of acquisition. In a language like German, focus accents are often realized in nonfinal position, given that the non-finite verb forms of complex predicates (infinitives, participles) in main clauses as well as the whole predicate in dependent clauses normally show up in phrase-final position (compare below, example 2) This is sometimes described as syntactic “de-accentuation” (cf Avesani et al 2015: 99). In comparable sentences in Italian the nuclear accent is likewise on the argument, and in rightmost position:

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