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This study explored the prosodic realization of focus in four typologically unrelated languages: American English, Paraguayan Guaraní, Moroccan Arabic, and K’iche’. American English and Paraguayan Guaraní mark prosodic prominence culminatively on the head of the prosodic unit, whereas Moroccan Arabic and K’iche’ mark prosodic prominence demarcatively on the right edge of the prosodic unit. To allow...
This paper presents the first study of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Samoan, an Austronesian VSO language. It is shown that while Samoan appears to use syntax to mark focus, focus marking in Samoan actually fits well within the generalisation that focus must be maximally prosodically prominent. Seven native speakers were recorded answering questions about pictures depicting simple events...
As a universal phenomenon, prosodic structuring of discourse can be found in both spoken and sign languages. As natural languages in a different modality, namely the visual-gestural modality as opposed to the oral-auditory modality of spoken languages, sign languages obviously use visual cues to mark information structure in discourse. Sign languages have available manual (arms and hands) and nonmanual...
This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness)...
We investigate a semantic–pragmatic hypothesis (relative givenness, Wagner, 2006) on an annotated corpus of German speech data. We show that nominal deaccentuation in an [AN] (adjective–noun) combination neither requires the givenness of N nor the availability of a different [A′N] sequence in the overt discourse context but results from the fact that a referentially distinct alternative is either...
The difference in the default prosodic realization of simple sentences with unergative vs. unaccusative/passive verbs (assigning early nuclear accent with unaccusative/passive verbs but late nuclear accent with unergative verbs) is often related to the syntactic distinction of their nominative arguments as starting off in different hierarchical positions. Alternative accounts try to trace this prosodic...
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