Prosody-inherent factors affecting pitch accent placement – deaccentuation of foci due to pitch accent clashes

Nadja Schauffler
Institut für Linguistik/Anglistik, Universität Stuttgart

Information structure can be marked by both pitch accent placement and pitch accent type. In German, new information has been shown to be marked by falling accents, while given information is associated with rising accents or deaccentuation (cf. e.g. Baumann, 2006; Schweitzer et al., 2009). However, a one-to-one mapping of this kind does not seem to be possible as there is quite a lot of variation in the actual choice of pitch accent type and pitch accent placement: for instance, some constituents may remain unaccented even if a pitch accent would be demanded by the information structural context, and others carry an accent although there is no such semantic bias.
The current pilot study, a sentence reading experiment, is intended to examine factors that contribute to this variation in pitch accent placement. The stimuli were designed to test the production of double foci in two different sentence constructions. The hypothesis is that an information structurally required accent may be omitted if its production were to lead to a pitch accent clash, like in the conditions 1a and 2a.

Stimuli Type I:
Context sentence:
Hat Konrad erzählt, dass Heinz in Köln den Pfleger gefeuert hat?
(Did K. say that H. in Cologne has fired the nurse?)
Condition 1a: 2 Foci with pitch accent clash:
Nein, er hat erzählt, dass Heinz in Köln den ARZT ANgestellt hat.
(No, he said that H. in Cologne has hired the doctor.)
Condition 1b: 2 Foci without pitch accent clash:
Nein, er hat erzählt, dass Heinz in Köln den ARZT verHAFtet hat.
(No, he said that H. in Cologne has arrested the doctor.)

Stimuli Type II
Context Sentence:
Hat Ole gesagt, dass Frank das Essen Pflegerinnen gegeben hat?
(Did O. say that F. has given the food to nurses?)
Condition 2a:
Nein, er hat gesagt, dass Frank das GeSCHENK MAlerinnen gegeben hat.
(No, he said that F. has given the present to painters.)
Condition 2b:
Nein, er hat erzählt, dass Frank das GeSCHENK MaSSEUrinnen gegeben hat.
(No, he said that F. has given the present to masseuses.)

In the pilot study, the type I stimuli were mostly realized with one accent. Condition 2b exhibited the most realizations of two pitch accents, compliant with our hypothesis (since there is no clash).
We aim to ask the following questions:
– Is the difference in productions of the two stimuli types the result of purely syntactic differences?
– Does the prosodic context (accent clash vs. no accent clash) influence the interpretation of the underlying question?
The stimuli type II will be used in an ERP study examining pitch accent clashes and their influence on sentence processing in silent reading.