https://iupress.istanbul.edu.tr/journal/tuded/article/divan-siirinde-gecen-musiki-istilahlarina-dair-genel-bir-tasnif-denemesi

Abstract

This study investigates prosodic marking of sentence initial aboutness topics and contrastive topics in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order in Turkish under six different conditions within experimental and theoretical perspectives. Fundamental frequency (F 0 ) and duration values are the evaluation criteria of the study. The conditions illustrate aboutness and contrastive topics -discourse-new or discourse given -in different information packaging options. These conditions are compared with focus phrases under broad focus conditions. The data were collected from native speakers with the help of dialogues including the target sentences. The sentences, extracted from the recordings, were annotated via Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2020). The results indicate that F 0 values at the right edge of the prenuclear domain and the nuclear domain are higher with topic phrases. Aboutness topics have higher values than contrastive topics. However, the statistical analysis indicates that this is not a categorical property when all six conditions are analyzed. Duration measurements of prenuclear, nuclear and postnuclear domains also do not differ under these six conditions. To conclude, Turkish aboutness and contrastive topics are marked with different syntactic and semantic tools, but they are not marked with a distinctive prosodic strategy and they do not differ from broad focus sentences.