Incremental Specification of Focus and Givenness in a Discourse Context
PI: Grzegorz Dogil, Hans Kamp
Researchers: Arndt Riester, Katrin Schweitzer
In phase two A1 will continue its investigation of correlations between information structural and prosodic categories. As opposed to phase one we will concentrate on contrastive focus rather than on categories of information status. This switch will make it necessary to try to match not just semantic and prosodic properties of individual constituents, as in phase one, but relations between pairs or groups of constituents.
In parallel, with this central task, a number of questions will be addressed that arose in phase one. These questions deal more generally with the nature of intonation. Results from phase one show that pitch accents can be subject to frequency effects of the tonal as well as the information structural context. While these results present a challenge for traditional autosegmental theories of intonation, they are well explainable in usage-based accounts.
A1 aims to integrate intonation in a usage-based model of speech, where information structural as well as other linguistic context is taken into account.