The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

Féry, Caroline; Ishihara, Shinichiro

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.001.0001

Cited by 17 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 459 publications

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“…Section 5.3.2). This is equivalent to the attested, but unusual, 'second occurrence focus' cases in English and German (Beaver et al 2007;Baumann 2014). Therefore, other speakers interpreted 'only ate the melon earlier' as a second information unit, a second rheme (49b).…”

Section: Information-structure Hypothesis: Phrasingmentioning

confidence: 52%

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Calhoun

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the functions of prosodic phrasing in the Austronesian VSO language Samoan. Two types of sentences are investigated, exclusives (involving the particle na'o 'only') and equatives. Two complementary methodologies were used, a production study and an acceptability judgment study, to examine the prosodic realisation and relative naturalness of different word orderings of the two sentence types. The particle na'o has an unusual distribution: preceding the initial constituent, be it the verb or a fronted noun phrase; or following the verb, but only modifying the absolutive (object). It was found that post-verbal absolutives modified by na'o are usually not preceded by a phrase boundary, unlike unmodified absolutives which are consistently preceded by a high phrase tone (H-) (cf. Yu 2009). Equatives in Samoan involve clauses which are the juxtaposition of two noun phrases, one the rheme (focus) and the other the theme (topic). It was found that rhemes are usually followed by a phrase break, while for themes this is optional. Rheme-theme order was strongly preferred to theme-rheme order. These findings are argued to show a close relationship between information structure, constituent ordering and prosodic phrasing in Samoan. The preferred order of constituents in Samoan is rheme-theme, with a high phrase tone marking the end of the rheme. The absolutive argument is strongly preferred to be at the start of the theme.

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Section: Information-structure Hypothesis: Phrasingmentioning

confidence: 52%

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Calhoun

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…[23] For discussion and references to a wide variety of languages with different combinations of prominence and boundary properties, see Jun (2005Jun ( , 2014, Féry (2013Féry ( , 2017. For discussion of focus and prosody in a range of African languages in particular, see work by Downing, and references cited therein (among others, Downing 2008Downing , 2010Downing , 2013Downing & Pompino-Marschall 2013;Downing & Hyman 2016. ) to address the question of Indonesian stress in two ways, seeking both direct evidence of stress, as the enhancement of a particular syllable in the absence focus, and indirect evidence, as the enhancement of a particular syllable serving as the main locus of focus enhancement.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian

Athanasopoulou¹,

Vogel²,

Pincus³

2021

J. Ling.

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Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

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“…Due to the need for a uniform clarity in approaches, notions, and definitions in the field of IS research, this paper follows those presented in the Oxford Handbook of Information Structure (OHIS) (Féry & Ishihara 2016). Relevant here are the notions of common ground, givenness, topic, focus (all after Krifka 2008), verum focus, the notion of contrast, and differential argument marking (DAM).…”

Section: Terminologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mùwe Ké Focus Structures

Archer

2024

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The present study is an investigation of the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké (Tibeto-Burman, Mugu, Nepal). The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane/-gadiː and a preferred immediately preverbal position, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus. The research and analyses are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal, including the Questionnaire on Information Structure (Skopeteas et al. 2006). The paper is intended as a partner for and precursor to Archer (2023a), which questions the notion of focus as a category and subsequently reanalyses the data presented here.

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The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

Cited by 17 publications

References 459 publications

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian

Mùwe Ké Focus Structures

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