Abstract
This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in non-native German. Ten proficient learners of German with Italian L1 were recorded reading aloud 40 sentences containing mostly non-final focused constituents embedded in an adequate question context. Non-final focus accents in L2 German are difficult for Italian learners to produce, especially in broad focus contexts with de-accentuation of final verb forms (cf. Paschke/Vogt, in press), because their native language has a strong positional requirement of rightmostness. Given that both German and Italian use pitch accents for information structuring, i. e. to highlight important information, a correct placement of focus accents might, however, be favoured by narrow focus contexts in which prosodic prominence has to be assigned to one specific constituent. In addition to this main hypothesis, the study investigated whether additional clues (such as prosodic highlighting of the relevant constituent in the L2 question, a corresponding syntactic and prosodic structure between L1 and L2) might increase the success rate. The data shows that advanced Italian speakers of German L2 correctly realize non-final focus accents in more than half of the narrow focus contexts, but that their success rate is not significantly higher than in the broad focus condition and is not affected by the additional clues provided.
Highlights
Intonation is crucial to non-native language: it determines a foreign accent and comprehensibility and speaker image, but it affects linguistic meaning, e. g. the distinction between questions and statements
We expected learners to be able to single out the arguments under narrow focus and correctly place an acoustic focus accent on them given that in both languages, informational focus is highlighted by assigning a pitch accent
The basic assumption underlying the present paper was the idea that non-final focus accents in L2 German, which are generally difficult to acquire for Italian learners, could be facilitated by narrow focus contexts
Summary
Intonation is crucial to non-native language: it determines a foreign accent and comprehensibility and speaker image, but it affects linguistic meaning, e. g. the distinction between questions and statements. Many languages, including the two under investigation in this paper, Italian and German, highlight the constituent under informational focus in a sentence with the help of a pitch accent, that is, informational focus and (phonetic) focus accent fall together. Both German and Italian obey the principle of "the togetherness of focus and intonational prominences" (Vallduví 1991: 295) they differ in the way they achieve it. What's new?), in normal linear word order, Italian speakers place a focus accent on the rightmost word.
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