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Theoretical accounts agree that German restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are integrated at the level of syntax as well as at the level of prosody (; , ; ; ; ) in both the default verb-final and the marked verb-second variant (referred to as iV2). Both variants are assumed to show the same prosodic pattern, i. e., prosodic integration into the main clause, and not unintegrated prosody, which would signal a sequence of two main clauses. To date strong empirical evidence for this close correspondence between prosody and syntax in RCs is missing. Findings regarding prosodic integration of verb-final RCs are not consistent, and research regarding the prosody of iV2 structures is very scarce. Using a delayed sentence-repetition task, our study investigated whether subordination is signaled by prosody in RCs in both the verb-final and the V2 variant in adults (n = 21). In addition, we asked whether young language learners (n = 23), who at the age of 3 have just started to produce embedded clauses, are already sensitive to this mapping. The adult responses showed significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in the V-final and the iV2 structures, with no difference between the two conditions. Notably, the child responses mirrored this adult behavior, showing significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in both V-final and iV2 structures. The findings regarding adults’ prosodic realizations provide novel empirical evidence for the claim that iV2 structures, just like verb-final RCs, show prosodic integration. Moreover, our study strongly suggests that subordination is signaled by prosody already by age 3 in both verb-final and V2 variants of RCs.
A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results.
Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.
This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse.
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.
In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions.
New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.