Prosodic marking of focus domains - categorical or gradient?

By Stefan Baumann, Martine Grice, Susanne Steindamm. Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2006

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports on a production experiment in German eliciting focus domains of various sizes, ranging from broad to narrow focus, as well as contrastive focus. Results show that speakers use categorical as well as gradient prosodic means to indicate different focus structures, with an increase of prominence-lending cues as the focus domain narrows. Contrast is shown to enhance certain differences between narrow and broad focus. There is a clear indication that speakers differ considerably as to the combination of strategies they employ for marking focus structure.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b070735e6e8eb861ff9a6b69c68e4fcdda0f1948

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Citations in the corpus

Focus, Word Order and Intonation in Hindi (2008, background): “Thus, we found no evidence of pre-focal compression due to givenness, and no raising of F0 as a consequence of focus as reported for many intonation languages (e.g., Bartels and Kingston 1994, Baumann et al. 2006, Cooper et al. 1985, Féry and Kügler 2008).”
TONAL AND ARTICULATORY MARKING OF FOCUS IN GERMAN (2007, background): “In the present stud y, which is a refinement of [1], we investigate tonal, durational and articulatory ways of marking differe nt focus structures (broad, narrow, and contrastive – in fact, corrective – focus).”