On the alleged existence of contrastive accents

Abstract

Speakers may use pitch accents as pointers to new information, or as signals of a contrast relation between the accented item and a limited set of alternatives. There is no consensus in the literature whether a separately identifiable contrastive accent exists. Some studies report that contrastive accents are more emphatic than newness accents and have a different melodic shape. In other studies, however, it is maintained that contrastiveness can only be determined by looking at how accents are distributed in an utterance. It is argued that these two contrasting views on contrastiveness can be reconciled by showing that they apply on different levels. To this end, accent patterns were obtained in a (semi-)spontaneous way via a dialogue game (Dutch) in which two participants had to describe coloured figures in consecutive turns. By varying the sequential order, target descriptions (`blue square') were collected in four contexts: no contrast (all new), contrast in the adjective, contrast in the noun, all contrast. A distributional analysis revealed that both all new and all contrast situations correspond with double accents, whereas single accents on the adjective or the noun are used when these are contrastive. Single contrastive accents on the adjective are acoustically different from newness accents in the same syntactic position. The former have the shape of a `nuclear' accent, whereas the newness accents on the adjective are `prenuclear'. Contrastive accents stand out as perceptually more prominent than newness accents. This difference in salience tends to disappear if the accented word is heard in isolation.