Surface categorical variation In the prosodic marking of English focus

Abstract

This study investigates the variability of focus prosody in English. In intonational phonology of English, focus is known to be marked with a L + H* pitch accent on a focused word followed by deaccenting (Ø) post-focus words (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986). 80 speakers participated in a picture naming task where they named images (e.g., blue ball, yellow chair) they saw using the phrase “There was a Adjective1 Noun1, but now there's a Adjective2 Noun2.” Contrastive focus (CF) trials elicited narrow focus on the Adjective2 and Non-contrastive (NC) ones did not. For “a Adjective2 Noun2”, f0 contours were ToBI annotated and various acoustic measurements were taken. Preliminary results indicate that in the CF condition, Adjective2 was most often marked by L + H*, but it is used only 40% of the time. In the other cases, Adjective2 carried either H*, H + !H*, L + !H*, or !H*. The tune used on Adjective2 Noun2 was mainly L + H* Ø, but L + H* !H*, H* Ø, and H + !H* Ø also occurred. These results raise questions about previous claims on phonological marking of focus and the level of tonal representation: what is the phonological status of the various pitch accent types used to mark focus? Are they distinctive or allotones of L + H*?