Prominence in French Dual Focus.

This paper investigates how French signals prominence in prosody in the post-verbal domain of sentences with two objects or two adjuncts that vary in information status and prosodic length. The information status of particular interest here is dual focus, defined as the presence of two foci in a mono-clausal sentence, but other information states are investigated as well. The controlled production experiment we report on allows for a detailed examination of prosodic prominence. High boundary tones at the end of non-final prosodic phrases are pervasive, as has been documented in many studies before the present one. An important but less documented result is the variation in different prosodic curs, in particular in the number and position of high tones, as well as the particular scaling relationship between them, providing a powerful tool for the expression of (dual) focus. We also report on a perception experiment with our data, showing a clear tendency for French listeners to select the intended context question, recognizing dual focus better than other information states. Overall, this article provides elements of answers as to why French prosody is so difficult to pin down, and why contradictory results and analyses have been proposed for this language.

Prosody of Dual-focus in German: Interaction between Focus and Phrasing.

This paper studies the prosodic realization of dual-focus in German, that is, two foci in a single sentence, with special consideration of the interaction between focus assignment and phrasing. In a production experiment, dual-focus was compared with its initial, final, and all-new counterparts in sentences with subject NPs and VPs of different lengths. The results showed that there were three different patterns of dual-focus realization: (1) The most frequent one was the two-peak pattern (57.8%), that is, a falling tone on both focused words and compressed and lowered pitch in-between; (2) the second most frequent was the two-phrase realization (23.5%), in which both foci were also realized as a falling tone, but in this case, a high boundary tone was inserted after the subject NP; (3) the least frequent pattern was the hat-pattern (18.7%), consisting of a rising tone on the first focus and a falling tone on the second one while the pitch in-between is kept as a high plateau. This was applied mostly in utterances containing a short subject NP. We interpret these results in terms of optional prosodic phrasing. A sentence with two foci can be realized in one or two intonation phrases, but in both cases, the focus is assigned within the prosodic domain derived from syntax. These results show that Culminativity, the principle requiring a one-to-one correspondence between prosodic domains and their heads, is violable in German. Two equally prominent pitch accents are allowed to co-exist in one intonation phrase. Finally, the metrical structure of dual-focus speaks for a recursive structure of German prosody.

Postfocal Downstep in German.

This article is a follow-up study of Féry and Kügler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680-703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account.