German sentence accent revisited

  • Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern.

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Metadaten
Author:Caroline Féry, Laura Herbst
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1112328
URL:http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2006/827/
Parent Title (German):Interdisciplinary studies on information structure / Ishihara, S., M. Schmitz and A. Schwarz (eds.) ; Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary studies on information structure ; Vol. 1
Publisher:Univ.-Verl.
Place of publication:Potsdam
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Year of Completion:2004
Year of first Publication:2004
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2008/11/06
Tag:information structure; prosody; syntax
Page Number:33
First Page:43
Last Page:75
Source:Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS), 1, 2004, 43-75 ; http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2006/827/
HeBIS-PPN:20771035X
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht

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