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

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 61; no. 2; pp. 303 - 333
• Main Authors: Wang, Bei, Féry, Caroline
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.06.2018; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Accentuation; Focus; German language; Intonation; Metrical phonology; Noun phrases; Phrases; Pitch; Prosody; Syntax; Syntax phonology relationship; Tone; dual-focus; intonation; phrasing
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/0023830917721942

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.