Prominence, contrastive focus and information packaging in Ghanaian English discourse

Abstract

Contrastive focus refers to the coding of information that is contrary to the presuppositions of the interlocutor. Thus, in everyday speech, speakers employ prominence to mark contrastive focus such that it gives an alternative answer to an explicit or implicit statement provided by the previous discourse or situation (Rooth, 1992), and plays an important role in facilitating language understanding. Even though contrastive focus has been investigated in native varieties of English, there is little or no knowledge of similar studies as far as non-native varieties of English, including that of Ghana, are concerned. The present study investigates how contrastive focus is marked with prosodic prominence in Ghanaian English, and how such a combination creates understanding among users of this variety. To achieve this, data consisting of 61/2 hours of English conversations from 200 Ghanaians were analyzed using both auditory and acoustic means. Results suggest that Ghanaians tend to shift the contrastive focus from the supposed focused syllable onto the last syllable of the utterance, especially when that syllable ends the utterance. Although such tendencies may shift the focus of the utterance, the data suggest that listeners do not seem to have any problem with speakers’ packaging of such information.