Pitch peak alignment as a function of lexical and pragmatic factors in two dialects of Serbian/Croatian

Abstract

This study examines the patterns of pitch peak retraction under focus in Serbian/Croatian (S/C). Acoustic measures of pitch peak alignment were used to identify the effect of pragmatic focus on pitch realization in two dialects of S/C with typologically distinct prosodic systems. In the Belgrade dialect there is a lexically determined contrast between two tonal alignments: early peak (‘‘falling accent’’) and late peak (‘‘rising accent’’). In the Zagreb dialect there is no such lexical distinction; instead, each word typically receives a pitch prominence on the stressed syllable. Subjects produced target words with neutral intonation and with narrow/contrastive focus. The peak alignment under these two pragmatic conditions was shown to vary in the two dialects. Zagreb shows peak retraction from late (neutral intonation) to early peak (narrow focus). In this way it is similar to other stress languages (e.g., Spanish). Belgrade, with lexically contrastive peak alignment, shows much less pragmatically conditioned variation in the position of accentual peaks. The two types of pragmatically conditioned alignment in Zagreb correspond closely to the two lexically determined alignments of Belgrade. This suggests that the existence of the lexical contrast limits the pitch variation due to the pragmatic influence, while in the absence of such contrast, pragmatic factors entirely determine peak alignment.