Where to associate stressed additive particles? evidence from speech prosody

Abstract

Theoretical approaches mostly associate stressed additive particles (e.g., auch in German) with contrastive topics. Empirical data show that associated constituents are produced more prominently than unassociated ones but not that they are contrastive topics. This paper compares the prosodic realizations of associated constituents with contrastive and non-contrastive topics. We found no differences in accent types but later alignment for contrastive than non-contrastive topics; associated constituents lie in-between. An unrestricted sentence completion task tested whether listeners produce more additive particles upon hearing fragments with contrastive compared to noncontrastive topics. Completions containing additive particles were generally very infrequent (< 4%), but crucially more frequent in sentences with a contrastive topic compared to a noncontrastive topic. Stressed additive particles seem to associate with prominent accents, which may often be contrastive topics.