Acoustic correlates of GIVENness in Icelandic: Revisiting the Radical Deaccentuation hypothesis

Abstract

This paper discusses whether there is a direct link between GIVENness-related deaccentuation and ellipsis. The idea that ellipsis can only target already-deaccented material with “distinguished low-flat intonation” (Chomsky & Lasnik 1993: 564) is known as the Radical Deaccentuation (RD) account (see e.g. Tancredi 1992). Icelandic represents a challenge for RD, as it permits (clausal) ellipsis (Wood et al. 2016, 2020) yet does not seem to display deaccentuation (Nolan & Jónsdóttir 2001, Dehé 2009). We conducted a prosodic production experiment to investigate the acoustic correlates of post-focal GIVENness in pre-elliptic clauses in Icelandic to determine if Icelandic undermines the RD theory. We found that Icelandic exhibits prosodic attenuation in pre-elliptic clauses, such that pitch accents of given items are realized, yet they exhibit lower overall F0, and shorter duration. We also found a difference in prosodic constituency between all-new and pre-elliptic clauses, such that the given part in only the pre-elliptic condition is structur-ally integrated to the prosodic domain of the focused item. Our empirical findings are compatible with a weaker version of RD, namely one which treats ‘deaccentuation’ as a cover term for any acoustic effect related to the prosodic marking of GIVENness.