Abstract
Two competing models attempt to explain the deaccentuation of antecedent-nonidentical discourse-inferable material (e.g., Bach wrote many pieces for viola. He must have LOVED string instruments). One uses a single grammatical constraint to license deaccenting for identical and nonidentical material. The second licenses deaccenting grammatically only for identical constituents, whereas deaccented nonidentical material requires accommodation of an alternative antecedent. In three experiments, we tested listeners’ preferences for accentuation or deaccentuation on nonidentical inferable material in out-of-the-blue contexts, supportive discourse contexts, and in the presence of the presupposition trigger too. The results indicate that listeners by default prefer for inferable material to be accented, but that this preference can be mitigated or even reversed with the help of manipulations in the broader discourse context. By contrast, listeners reliably preferred for repeated material to be deaccented. We argue that these results are more compatible with the accommodation model of deaccenting licensing, which allows for differential licensing of deaccentuation on inferable versus repeated constituents and provides a principled account of the sensitivity of accentuation preferences on inferable material to broader contextual manipulations.
Highlights
It has long been recognized that there is a close connection between a constituent’s information status within a discourse and its prosodic realization
The results for inferable verbs resemble those for discourse-new verbs, with participants preferring accentuation over deaccentuation
Participants significantly preferred sentences in which inferable verbs were accented over those in which they were deaccented. This contrasts somewhat with the predictions of both the grammatical and the accommodation accounts of deaccenting under nonidentity
Summary
It has long been recognized that there is a close connection between a constituent’s information status within a discourse and its prosodic realization. Contentful discourse-new constituents are realized with a high or rising pitch accent (Chafe 1974, Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990). In contrast to new constituents, constituents with an identical correlate in a local linguistic antecedent tend not to exhibit a high pitch accent. Such constituents are exempt from the default rules of stress assignment via an operation called deaccenting or stress shift, and are realized as prosodically reduced, according to both listener judgments and a phonetic correlates of emphasis such as intensity, F0, and duration (Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990, Chodroff & Cole 2019, Geiger & Xiang 2019). The final coffee in (2) is in a structural position to receive a nuclear pitch accent, it is deaccented by virtue of the instance of coffee in the previous clause, and the nuclear accent falls instead on LIKE
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