Nuclear Accent Research Articles

The inverse relation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences in German

The importance of pre-nuclear prominences for focus marking has been largely neglected. Recent studies, however, present first evidence that the prosody of the pre-nuclear region indicates its status as part of a broad focus or as pre-focal. This study presents a systematic investigation of the pre-nuclear domain and its relation to the nuclear accent in German. The results show that the realization of the pre-nuclear domain indeed depends on whether it is focal or pre-focal: The pre-nuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima and larger durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of a pre-focal, pre-nuclear domain depends on the following focus: The pre-nuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The comparison to the nuclear accent suggests an inverse relationship, i.e., the pre-nuclear domain becomes less prominent when the nuclear domain becomes more prominent. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains and entails the modulation of phrasal prominence profiles rather than just local adjustments of the nucleus.

In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish

This explorative study examines intonation contours in neutral and non-neutral statements of Paraguayan Spanish, a variety shaped by extensive contact with Guarani, a co-official language of Paraguay. Paraguayan Spanish displays both lexical and syntactic borrowings from Guarani, along with innovative intonation patterns not found in other Spanish varieties. Previous but still limited research on yes/no and wh-questions in this variety suggests the emergence of a unique intonational system, possibly of a hybrid nature, in both Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Guarani bilinguals. To date, no comprehensive description of intonation patterns in Paraguayan Spanish statements exists. The present study addresses this gap by analyzing data obtained through a Discourse Completion Task, covering broad-focus statements, contrastive focus, exclamatives, and statements of the obvious. Data were collected in 2014 from two monolingual speakers, eleven bilingual Spanish-dominant speakers, and eight bilingual Guarani-dominant speakers. The intonation is formalized using the Autosegmental–Metrical model of intonational phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices labeling system. The findings reveal three main realizations of nuclear accents (L+H*, H+L*, and innovative >H+L*) in neutral and non-neutral declarative sentences, lengthening of syllables, diverse syntactical strategies, and lexical borrowings. The study contributes to the understanding of a lesser-studied Spanish variety and offers insights into theoretical aspects of contact linguistics.

On the Nature of Verbal Non-Local Doubling in Patagonian Spanish

The main objective in this study is to describe and offer an account of verbal non-local doubling in Patagonian Spanish (PatSp), an understudied non-standard variety of Spanish in Argentina. We focus on data in which there are duplicated verbs surrounding an XP that bears the nuclear accent of the phrase (XPNA). First, our analysis describes the prosodic, semantic, and morphosyntactic behaviour of the data gathered. Second, we present the problems and challenges that doubling phenomena in PatSp pose for approaches that have tried to explain similar data in other Spanish varieties and other languages, such as the copy theory or prosodic cloning. Third, this work explores a biclausal analysis of verbal non-local doubling in PatSp in which each duplicate originates in a different clause, CP1 and CP2. In this approach, duplicated verbs (V1 and V2, according to their linear distribution) are not derivationally related. We also argue that the XPNA moves to the left periphery of CP2. This movement would account for the three typical traits of verbal duplication in PatSp: the mandatory adjacency between the nuclear accent and V2, the non-locality between verbal duplicates, and the semantic value of mirativity.

A common view on broad and contrastive focus events

This paper proposes a cognitive view on sentence stress patterns to discuss focus elements in both broad and narrow focus contexts. The cognitive perspective is based on the hypothesis that prosodic phrases correspond at the cortical level to cognitive binary relations between speech objects of utterances. On this view, cognitive relations are produced by a generic information packaging (IPk) mechanism that pairs constituents with different cognitive functions. At the utterance level, cognitive relations are implemented by prosodic phrases (relations) where different pitch features mark their two functional constituents. Our proposal is to assign sentence stress patterns with corresponding cognitive structural patterns of utterances. One of the two constituents of cognitive and prosodic relations is nuclear and projects its cognitive function to the whole cognitive unit which it belongs to. The paper proposes a nuclear accent analysis by connecting the cognitive functions of constituents with their phonetic/phonological features. The contours analyzed in the paper as hierarchies of cognitive/prosodic relations are selected from those used by Ladd (2008) to exemplify sentence stress patterns in broad focus statements with ascending and descending contours, and in contrastive focus statements. We conclude that, in the new perspective, different cognitive structural patterns can be assigned to contrastive/broad focus statements in different semantic contexts.

Visualizing prosodic structure: Manual gestures as highlighters of prosodic heads and edges in English academic discourses

Research has shown a close temporal relationship between prominence-lending tonal movements in speech and prominence in manual gesture. However, prosodic structure consists of not only prosodic heads (i.e., pitch accentuation) but also prosodic edges. To our knowledge, no previous studies have assessed the value of prosodic edges (nuclear vs. phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents) as anchoring sites for different types of gestures (i.e., referential vs. non-referential) while independently controlling for the relative degree of prominence associated with the pitch accent. The English M3D-TED corpus, which contains over 23 minutes of multimodal speech, was analyzed in terms of prosody and gesture. Results showed that while the majority of manual gesture strokes overlapped a pitch accented syllable (85.99%), apex alignment occurred at a relatively low rate (50.4%) and alignment rates did not significantly differ between referential and non-referential gestures. At the phrasal level, crucially our results also showed that strokes align with phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents over nuclear accents, and this relationship is not driven by relative prominence. These findings show that both prosodic heads and prosodic edges (i.e., phrase initial and final positions) are key sites for both referential and non-referential gesture production.

The prosody of surprise questions in Estonian

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

The interaction of discourse markers and prosody in rhetorical questions in German

Recent research has shown that rhetorical questions (RQs) have certain prosodic characteristics in terms of voice quality, tempo, and intonation, which distinguish them from genuine, information-seeking questions (ISQs). This paper focuses on the interaction between prosodic cues to rhetorical meaning on the one hand, and lexical and morpho-syntactic means, on the other, in German. The production experiment reported on here addresses three research questions, in short: (i) do speakers prefer a specific syntactic construction for an RQ, (ii) do they make use of specific lexical and morpho-syntactic means to signal rhetorical meaning, and (iii) what is the interaction between those means and prosodic cues. The answers are: (i) yes (wh-questions), (ii) yes (especially discourse markers (DiPs)), and (iii) we find an additive effect enforcing the rhetorical message. When lexical (or morpho-syntactic) cues to rhetorical meaning are used, we do not observe a reduction in or lack of prosodic means at the same time. For example, when a DiP is present, an RQ will still have a typical nuclear accent and edge tone, i.e., cues are used in an additive, rather than an exclusive way. There are, however, RQs that are marked only in the prosody, without any lexical or morpho-syntactic cues present.

Nuclear accent placement in broad focus intransitives in native and non-native English: an investigation of syntactic and pragmatic factors

Simple broad focus intransitives in English have been observed to occur with variable nuclear accent (NA) placement on either the subject or verb. This variability can be difficult to acquire in a second language (L2), especially when the speaker’s first language (L1), such as Spanish, has less flexible NA placement. Learners tend to transfer L1 intonational patterns into their L2, but there is still more to understand about the learning trajectory. Furthermore, the factors driving the NA placement alternation in intransitives are not yet fully understood for L1 speakers; there is a debate about whether NA placement is driven by syntactic factors, pragmatic factors, or a combination of the two. The study reported in this paper used an oral production task to elicit broad focus intransitives from both L1 English speakers and L1 Spanish L2 English learners. Verb type and expectedness were crossed in stimuli construction in order to test the effects of both syntactic and pragmatic factors on NA placement for both speaker groups. The results indicate that L1 speakers are most likely to produce NA on the subject of expected unaccusative verbs, and to produce NA on the verb in all other conditions. L2 speakers show a stronger preference for utterance-final NA placement on the verb, which is likely transferred from the preferred pattern of their L1. At the same time, L2 learners of higher proficiency do show evidence of acquiring the target NA placement pattern.

Tracing the Phonetic Space of Prosodic Focus Marking.

Focus is known to be expressed by a wide range of phonetic cues but only a few studies have explicitly compared different phonetic variables within the same experiment. Therefore, we presented results from an analysis of 19 phonetic variables conducted on a data set of the German language that comprises the opposition of unaccented (background) vs. accented (in focus), as well as different focus types with the nuclear accent on the same syllable (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). The phonetic variables are measures of the acoustic and articulographic signals of a target syllable. Overall, our results provide the highest number of reliable effects and largest effect sizes for accentuation (unaccented vs. accented), while the differentiation of focus types with accented target syllables (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus) are more subtle. The most important phonetic variables across all conditions are measures of the fundamental frequency. The articulatory variables and their corresponding acoustic formants reveal lower tongue positions for both vowels /o, a/, and larger lip openings for the vowel /a/ under increased prosodic prominence with the strongest effects for accentuation. While duration exhibits consistent mid-ranked results for both accentuation and the differentiation of focus types, measures related to intensity are particularly important for accentuation. Furthermore, voice quality and spectral tilt are affected by accentuation but also in the differentiation of focus types. Our results confirm that focus is realized via multiple phonetic cues. Additionally, the present analysis allows a comparison of the relative importance of different measures to better understand the phonetic space of focus marking.

Second language acquisition of Spanish prosody by Chinese speakers: Nuclear contours and pitch characteristics

Despite the increasing number of studies in L2 prosody, little research has been carried out on the Chinese-Spanish language pair. This article sets out to examine the L2 acquisition of nuclear contours and pitch implementation details of Spanish spoken by Chinese speakers. To this end, 555 utterances (produced by 37 informants) were analyzed within an autosegmental-metrical framework, and pitch values were evaluated using long-term distributional (LTD) and pitch dynamism quotient (PDQ) measures. The results suggest a hierarchy of difficulties in acquiring the prosodic features of different sentence types. The most salient intonational error made by the Chinese learners was the tendency to replace low nuclear accents with high/rising tones. Furthermore, the higher pitch level, narrower span, and lower F0 variance found for Chinese speakers lend support to previous hypotheses which proposed a general pitch compression pattern for L2 speech. Nevertheless, with increasing proficiency in Spanish, learners appear to develop more target-like intonation contours and pitch profiles. Finally, gender and stress effects as well as other interactions prove that L2 prosody learning is more complex than previously stated, and is influenced not only by the L1 system and oral competence but is also correlated with some psychological and sociocultural factors.

O uso de pistas secundárias na marcação de foco prosódico na fala de crianças com transtorno fonológico

ABSTRACT This paper presents an acoustic description of prosodic focus marking in speech of children with phonological disorder to identify which phonetic cues can be seen as markers of contrastive focus. The data was obtained in speech evaluation sessions through a task of repeating focus marking sentences. Duration, intensity and intonation on focused words were the phonetic cues under analysis. Results show that prosodic focus marking in speech of children with phonological disorder is characterized by increased duration and intensity, but is not characterized by the use of contrastive focus marking nuclear accent. These results are discussed considering, on one hand, the combination of phonetic cues relevant for characterizing the production of contrastive focus and, on the other hand, its clinical implications. We present contributions for both linguistic and clinical studies in language acquisition.

Прозодични характеристики на изречения с комуникативно маркиран и комуникативно немаркиран словоред

The paper presents the results from a study of the interaction between intonation and information structure in SVO and OVS sentences with communicatively (un)marked alignment of information structure elements. We analyzed the prosodic features of pre-nuclear and nuclear pitch accents. The information structure elements were characterized using Steedman’s (2000) model which classifies sentence constituents as belonging to one of the following categories: theme-background, theme-focus, rheme-background and rheme-focus. Our study found that unmarked and marked alignment has no effect on the pitch range of the rheme-focus. In cases of communicatively unmarked alignment, the pitch range of the theme-background (and rheme-background) group in OVS sentences is wider than in SVO sentences. Word order has no effect on the duration of the accented syllable. Topicalized constituents belonging to the theme-background in OVS sentences with unmarked alignment form separate intermediate phrases. In cases of marked alignment, the rheme-focus ends with a phrase accent and sometimes a pause. The rheme-background and rheme-focus always take a pitch accent, whereas the theme-background is marked by a pitch accent only in cases of communicatively unmarked alignment. The theme-background is deaccented when the sentence is communicatively marked.

Focus projection need not be based on pitch accents: evidence from Georgian

Based on experimental evidence, this paper shows that the prosodic realization of focus in Georgian is consistent with focus projection/percolation – the phenomenon by which prosodic prominence on a sub-constituent signals focus on a larger constituent – and can be accounted for with a Default Prosody-style analysis. In focus projection in English, object-focus utterances are realized in the same way as VP- or broad-focus utterances, because in all three cases the object carries the nuclear pitch accent. In contrast, in subject-focus utterances, the subject carries the nuclear pitch accent, which is incompatible with broad- or VP-focus interpretation; focus projection does not arise. Unlike English, Georgian, a ‘phrase language’, relies not on pitch accents but on boundary tones and phrasing in focus marking (Skopeteas & Féry 2010; 2016). This language type has not been explicitly addressed from the perspective of focus projection. Nevertheless, the results reported here demonstrate that the prosodic realization of subject- and object-focus in Georgian, expressed with boundary tones and duration of the stressed syllable, fits with the focus-projection pattern. This paper shows that the Georgian data can be accounted for with the Default Prosody approaches to focus projection, but not approaches employing the formal mechanism of F-projection. Accordingly, the Georgian facts provide a novel argument in favor of the Default Prosody approaches.

Pitch accents and boundary tones in narrow focus statements in Basque Spanish

This presentation examines the intonation of non-contrastive narrow focus in 15 Spanish-Basque bilinguals from the Basque Country, Spain. A total of 150 semi-spontaneous statements with sentence-final new-information focus were analyzed in Praat following Spanish ToBi conventions (Aguilar et al., 2009). We report the pitch contour of prenuclear and nuclear accents and the prevalence of intermediate phrase boundaries (ip) before the focal element, none of which have been previously investigated in this Spanish variety. Results show that while the first prenuclear accent is generally delayed regardless of bilingualism (93%), the second one is delayed more often in Basque-dominant speakers. Rising-falling nuclear contours (L + H* L%), reported for broad focus in Basque Spanish (Robles Puente, 2012) and for narrow focus in other Spanish dialects (Aguilar et al., 2009), were most common in Spanish-dominant participants, while Basque-dominant participants tended to show falling contours (L* L%). Pre-focal ip boundaries occurred in 69% of sentences, regardless of bilingualism degree. Ip boundaries were typically rising, mostly involving continuation rises, although high plateaus were also attested. We will connect these novel findings to the intonational characteristics of narrow focus in Bizkaian Basque (Elordieta & Hualde, 2014) and other Peninsular Spanish dialects (Face, 2000; 2008).

The influence of informativeness on the prosody of sentence topics

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.

Entonación de los enunciados aseverativos en el español de la Ciudad de México entre los años 1960 y 1970

This paper describes the prosodic features —with emphasis on the nuclear pitch accent— of the statements documented in the corpus “Norma lingüística culta” and “Habla popular de la Ciudad de México” (Lope Blanch, 1971, 1976). The prosodic description is carried out with the Autosegmental Metrical model and the analysis of sociolinguistic factors. Regarding the nuclear pitch accent L+H *, the statistical analysis showed two significant factors: narrow focus statements and the low level of education. The nuclear accent H * is more prevalent in men and the low level of education. By contrast we observed that the group of adults, the higher education and the broad focus statements favor the descending contour, which has lesser relation with vernacular patterns in Central Mexican Spanish.

Big accents in Stockholm Swedish: Nuclear accents, prenuclear accents, and initiality accents

Stockholm Swedish has a distinction between so-called big accents and small accents (in addition to a lexical contrast between tone accent 1 and tone accent 2). The function and distribution of the big versus small accent has never been fully understood. West Germanic languages lack a corresponding distinction. While it is known that big accents appear on information-structural focus, this fact cannot account for all big accents, nor can it explain the existence of the big accent in relation to the domains of the prosodic hierarchy. In this article, the distribution of big accents in preverbal subjects is studied. A production study is presented where native speakers read sentences with preverbal subjects of four different lengths, with or without information-structural focus. Based on the results, it is argued that heads of prosodic phrases (φ) serve as hosts of big accents (one and only one big accent per φ). The rightmost big accent in the intonation phrase (ι) is referred to as the nuclear accent, and all other (non-rightmost) big accents are referred to as prenuclear accents. Heads of φ are aligned with the right edge of φ by default. However, the leftmost φ inside an ι may (non-obligatorily) be left-headed, causing a big accent to appear at the leftmost prosodic word (ω) of ι. Such left-aligned prenuclear accents are referred to as initiality accents. These assumptions regarding the big accent in Stockholm Swedish account for the large observed variation in terms of big accent distribution in the preverbal subjects.

Italian wh-questions and the low periphery

AbstractThis article deals with Italian questions with a post-verbal wh-element, which are generally defined asin situ. We show that post-verbal wh-questions can be interpreted as information-seeking questions, and provide syntactic arguments supporting the hypothesis that the post-verbal wh-element is only apparentlyin situ. We claim that, in certain contexts, the post-verbal wh-element undergoes a syntactic movement targeting a low-peripheral focus position dedicated to the expression of informational focus. We integrate our analysis with the examination of a number of cases of low-peripheral wh-elements from the CLIPS and LIP corpora of spoken Italian. As for prosody, the available data show that a sentence-final wh-element carries the nuclear accent of the utterance. Moreover, low-peripheral wh-questions seem pragmatically more restricted compared to their counterparts with a fronted wh-. Although further investigation may reveal additional contexts for the questions at stake, low-peripheral wh-questions need to be linked to the preceding discourse context and can be used to add emphasis to the missing piece of information represented by the wh-element.Our low-peripheral analysis complements the current left-peripheral analysis of Italian wh-questions: wh-elements in left and low periphery display different interpretive and prosodic properties, indicating that they are involved in different phenomena. The results of this study also support the view that the low periphery is more subject to pragmatic restrictions compared to the left periphery.

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

The paper investigates the interplay between intonational cues and individual variability in the perceptual assessment of speakers’ epistemic bias in Salerno Italian yes-no questions. We present a perception experiment in which we manipulated pitch span within the nuclear configuration (both nuclear accent and boundary tone) to predict degree of perceived positive bias (i.e., expected positive answer) to yes-no question stimuli. Our results show that a wider pitch span within the nuclear region predicts a higher degree of perceived positive bias, while negative bias is predicted by narrow pitch span. Crucially, though, two interacting sources of listener variability were uncovered, i.e., prolonged exposure to a non-native dialect as well as degree of empathy (i.e., Empathy Quotient, EQ). Exposure to non-native phonological systems was found to affect the way pitch span is mapped onto perceived epistemic bias, through category interference, though mediated by EQ levels. Specifically, high-empathy listeners were more affected by degree of non-native dialect exposure. EQ scores were hence found to have an effect on gradual span manipulation by interacting with the dialect exposure effect. These results advance our understanding of the intonation-meaning mapping by taking into account both the impact of gradual phonetic cues on meaning processing as well as uncovering sources of cognitive variability at the perceiver’s level.

Nuclear prominence in ellipsis: Evidence from aggressively non-D-linked phrases

This paper investigates the reason why aggressively non-D-linked items such as wh-the-hell (WTH) are allowed in swiping, but not in sluicing. Investigating the potential syntactic, semantic and prosodic licensors of WTH in sluicing and swiping in the British English variety, we conclude that syntactic or semantic constraints cannot be the source of the difference. Instead, we propose a novel prosodic account in which the WTH must satisfy the prosodic licensing condition that it cannot bear nuclear accent. We show that this is satisfied in swiping, but not in sluicing contexts. On the basis of the novel findings of an acceptability rating study of swiping, which reveal that both ‘given’ and ‘new’ prepositions are equally acceptable for British English speakers, we argue that the preposition is accentuated in this elliptical construction because it is structurally the deepest element. The licensing condition on WTHs in sluicing and swiping is therefore not mediated directly by the conditions on ellipsis, but by the particular prosodic distribution that a WTH happens to have in sluicing and swiping. We extend the account to similar constructions in Dutch.