Prominence and focus: The tension between acoustic cues and phonological structure

Abstract

Across many languages, prosodic prominence signals focus. For example, “Does SHE like it?” has different implications to “Does she LIKE it?” (capitals indicate prominence), as the prominence marks focus and therefore a different implied contrast (with she versus like). In prosody research, there has always been a tension in the extent to which prominence is marked directly by psychoacoustic cues (higher pitch, loudness, length, etc.), which may be universal across languages, versus prominence being part of phonological structure, and therefore language-specific (e.g., Ladd, 2008). I review my research on the production and perception of focus in the understudied Polynesian languages Samoan and te reo Māori (Calhoun, 2015, 2016; Calhoun et al., 2021, 2023, in press), as well as other diverse languages (e.g. see Kügler & Calhoun, 2020). This research shows very clearly that cues to prominence vary substantially across languages and must be related to the phonological system of a given language. Nonetheless, questions about whether psychoacoustic cues directly signal focus, or its pragmatic sister, (paralinguistic) emphasis, alongside or within phonological structure, remain unresolved (e.g., Ladd and Arvaniti, 2023). I consider recent research offering new approaches to resolving this tension in relation to results from understudied languages.