Abstract
In a production experiment on German we investigated the prosodic effects of informativeness (comprising information status and contrast) on sentence-initial referents, i.e. sentence topics. While referents in sentence-final position usually receive the nuclear accent of the utterance, commonly defined as the last and information-structurally crucial pitch accent in an intonation unit, sentence topics in German often carry a prenuclear accent. However, the status of prenuclear accents is still unclear: are they just “ornamental” or do they express meaning differences? We expected to find a direct relationship between the informativeness of a sentence topic and its prosodic prominence but the hypothesis could only be confirmed to a very limited extent. Results show that informativeness does not affect the accent type of sentence-initial referents, as they are consistently marked by rising prenuclear accents, even on given items. Only the parameter duration shows a main effect of informativeness in the expected direction, since contrastive referents proved to be longer than given ones. In general, and surprisingly, however, contrastive topics are mostly produced as prosodically less prominent than non-contrastive items that are either given, accessible or new. An explanation that holds for our data set may be that the contrast is already expressed by a parallel syntactic structure, which speakers often realize prosodically by a flat hat pattern. We conclude that prenuclear accents on sentence- initial referents are consistently placed for rhythmic reasons in German and that their prosodic form is only slightly influenced by a referent’s level of informativeness.
Highlights
1.1 The status – and functions – of nuclear and prenuclear pitch accentsMost studies on the relation between prosody and meaning restrict themselves to form and function of nuclear accents, commonly defined as the last pitch accent in an intonation unit and as the structural head of this unit
Little attention has so far been paid to the investigation of prenuclear accents, defined as pitch accents that occur before the nucleus within the same intonation unit
As to the distribution of accent types, we hypothesize that given information will be deaccented, accessible information will be marked by a low accent, new information by a high accent, and contrastive referents by a rising accent (see (4) above)
Summary
1.1 The status – and functions – of nuclear and prenuclear pitch accentsMost studies on the relation between prosody and meaning restrict themselves to form and function of nuclear accents, commonly defined as the last pitch accent in an intonation unit and as the structural head of this unit. Little attention has so far been paid to the investigation of prenuclear accents, defined as pitch accents that occur before the nucleus within the same intonation unit Both their structural and functional status is unclear, since previous studies obtain inconsistent results. It has been shown that prenuclear accents yield a lower inter-transcriber agreement than nuclear accents (see studies using the ToBI model for English and German, such as Pitrelli et al 1994; Syrdal & McGory 2000; Grice et al 1996), and that there is a relatively low listener sensitivity to prenuclear accents which may surface as longer reaction times in an accent recognition task (Jagdfeld & Baumann 2011) In the latter experiment, which used cross-splicing, acoustically identical weak accents were perceived much more often as accents if they stood in nuclear position and less so if they appeared in prenuclear position instead. Example (2) is adopted from Büring (2007) and suggests that prenuclear accents (indicated by small capitals) on the subject Gus as well as the verb voted are possible but not obligatory
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