When Semantics Meets Phonetics: Acoustical Studies of Second-Occurrence Focus

By David I. Beaver, David Clark, David Flemming, David Jaeger, David I. Brady Edward Stanton T. Florian Maria Wolters. 2007

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A second-occurrence (SO) focus is the semantic focus of a focus-sensitive operator (e.g. only), but is a repeat of anearlier focused occurrence. We report onthe first systematic productionan d perception experiments to show that SO foci occurring after a nuclear accent are, as Rooth (1996b) has claimed, prosodically marked. We find that (i) there is no mean pitch rise on SO foci, (ii) SO foci are marked by longer duration and greater energy, and (iii) listeners are able to detect the difference between SO foci and nonfoci. On the basis of these results, we argue that SO focus is compatible with theories of focus interpretationthat it has beenclaimed to contradict.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/595b1b2627a22098e594d42055aa2ad151cdb794

Citations in the corpus

• CONTRASTIVE FOCUS, GIVENNESS AND THE UNMARKED STATUS OF "DISCOURSE-NEW"* (2008, unknown): “4 Rooth (1996b), Bartels (1995, 2004), Beaver et al. (2004/to appear), Féry and Ishihara (2006).”