Projective vs. interpretational properties of nuclear accents and the phonology of contrastive focus in Greek

Abstract

Nuclear accents have two interesting properties. First, they have a projective property, i.e., they may refer to a focus domain that encompasses a higher syntactic projection. Second, at least for some languages, nuclear accents may have an interpretational property, i.e., they may have alternative realizations that reveal particular interpretations, such as contrast, correction, surprise, etc. The present article examines the interaction between the projective and the interpretational properties of nuclear pitch accents. Based on an experimental study on Greek, we show that the nuclear accent that is interpreted as ‘contrastive’ refers to a local focus domain, i.e., it is not projected to higher layers of the constituent structure. Furthermore, our experimental findings show that these properties interact with syntactic and prosodic markedness, in a way that the canonical word order and the unmarked accentual structure are felicitous in a larger array of contexts than the marked syntactic and accentual configurations.