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

Abstract

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.

Prominence in French Dual Focus

“…However, in comparison with the other languages for which experimental evidence exist for the realization of dual focus, our data suggests a clear difference from German and English; see Wang and Féry (2017) for German. The listeners in the latter language prove to be much more reliable at discriminating across the four focus types encoded in the (non)-congruent questions presented in the experimental task.…”

“…We speculate that the post-focal compression that was realized by a number of speakers was decisive in the recognition of an initial focus, whereas the other conditions did not vary that much. This is especially obvious in comparison to results for the same experience conducted in German (see Wang & Féry, 2017), where the preference for the correct response is much larger in each condition. In German as well, initial focus elicited the best results, but the other conditions were also much better recognized than for French.…”

“…Despite the growing body of experimental work on the interaction between prosody and information structure in French, the realization of dual focus is rarely examined. Yet this strikes us as an important issue given that mainstream prosodic theories typically disallow two main prosodic heads within one prosodic domain (see Gussenhoven, 2004; Selkirk, 1995; Truckenbrodt, 1995, as well as Kabagema-Bilan, López-Jiménez, & Truckenbrodt, 2011, and Wang & Féry, 2017 for an explicit formulation of the conflict). So, the issue comes down to understanding how phonetics and phonology cope with two foci within a single sentence, especially compared to single focus or to wide focus.…”

“…The past literature often presumed a negative answer, assuming that if two foci have to co-exist in one intonational phrase, one is more prominent than the other, resulting in a sequence of a subordinated secondary accent and a primary nuclear accent (Jackendoff, 1972; Truckenbrodt, 1995). Although empirical studies only exist for a few languages—that is, English, German, and Mandarin (see Eady, Cooper, Klouda, Mueller, & Lotts, 1986; Kabagema-Bilan et al, 2011; Wang & Féry, 2015, 2017)—these languages are shown to react differently to this conflict and to display different strategies as to how they realize dual focus. For instance, based on careful phonetic analyses, English and Mandarin allow two heads in a single prosodic domain of the size of an Intonation Phrase, while German adds the possibility of changing the phrasing, signaled by changes in the F0 and by duration.…”

Alternation preferences affect focus marking in German and English differently

“…To sum up, the two studies show that double focus in English is in a way a composition of two single foci in terms of pitch, duration and contour. This is different from what has been found for German where the presence of the second focus caused various realizations of the preceding first focus (Wang and Féry, 2018 ).…”