Abstract
This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fall contour. The acoustic analysis of these contours revealed a significant effect of contrastiveness on the height/alignment of the accent peak as a function of focus context. On the other hand, the height/alignment of the low turning point at the beginning of the rise did not show an effect of contrastiveness. In a series of semantic congruency perception tests participants judged the congruency of congruent and incongruent context-stimulus pairs based on three different sets of stimuli: (i) original data, (ii) manipulation of accent peak, and (iii) manipulation of the leading low. Listeners distinguished nuclear rise-fall contours as a function of focus context (Experiment 1 and 2), however not based on manipulations of the leading low (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the alignment and scaling of the accentual peak are sufficient to license a contrastive interpretation of a nuclear rise-fall contour, leaving the rising part as a phonetic onglide, or as a low tone that does not interact with the contrastivity of the context.
Highlights
This paper reports the results of a production experiment and a series of perception experiments that concern the prosodic expression of contrast in German
We find a significantly lower excursion size (E) in broad focus (BF) compared to contrastive focus (CF), a significantly slower velocity of the rise (V) in BF compared to CF, a significantly earlier alignment of the accentual peak in relation to the end of the syllable (A–H) in BF compared to CF, and a significantly shorter duration (D) in BF compared to CF
As described for perception Experiment 1, Section 3.1.4, we fit a multilevel model with CONTEXT and MANIPULATION as fixed factors, and calculated likelihood ratio tests on the basis of backward modeling of the random factors to identify the best fit model
Summary
This paper reports the results of a production experiment and a series of perception experiments that concern the prosodic expression of contrast in German. We investigate the phonetic details of the rise-fall contour in contexts that license either a non-contrastive or contrastive interpretation of the answer. The perception experiments seek to clarify the functional interpretation of the rise-fall contour in these contexts. A brief background on the focus-to-accent theory and the theory of intonational meaning is provided, which is mostly based on a discussion of English intonation. This discussion is followed by a brief review of German intonation and its relation to the prosodic expression of focus and contrast. Focus defined as an indication of “the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions” (Krifka, 2008, p. 247)
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