Tonal association and derived nuclear accents—The case of downstepping contours in German

Abstract

We report on two production experiments which together provide additional support for treating downstep as orthogonal to the tonal structure of utterances, in the sense that certain intonational meanings are expressed by a downstep relation between two H tones, rather than by a particular accent type or accent sequence. The intonational meanings investigated were inferentially accessible information on the one hand and broad focus on the other. In the first experiment an increase in pitch span provided evidence for an analysis of the early peak accent under investigation as H+!H* rather than H+L*, since the starred tone was raised along with pitch span increase, as would be expected of a high tone. Thus we confirmed the presence of a downstepped tone in this accent. In the second experiment we showed that the distribution of accents favoured a downstep in broad focus utterances, as opposed to narrow or contrastive focus utterances. Within each of these contexts alternation was found between downstep across accents (e.g. H* !H*) and downstep within an accent (H+!H*). This suggests first of all that downstep applies independently of how the tones are associated (e.g. whether they are the starred tones of two separate accents, or the leading and starred tone of a single accent), and secondly that H* !H* and H+!H* are related and should be analysed as such.