Effect of “only” on prosodic focus marking

Abstract

This study seeks to determine how the inclusion of the focus-sensitive word “only” affects the focus-marking prosody of a sentence. Twenty-one native English speaking adults read 8 question-answer pairs. The questions were written to elicit focus on an object NP (e.g., Who did you see?). In one condition, the answer contained only (e.g., I only saw Mary); in the other condition, “only” was omitted (e.g., I saw Mary.). The recordings were annotated in Praat using forced alignment. We performed linear residualization of F0, amplitude and duration (cf. Breen et al. 2009) to remove effects of item and participant. Statistical models of residual pitch and duration on object-NP and verb failed to show any significant differences between the sentences that contain “only” and those not containing “only”. These results fail to support theories of utterance-level prominence, which posit a categorical distinction between presentational and contrastive focus (e.g., Katz and Selkirk 2011).