Caroline Féry

Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German

Abstract The influence of information structure on tonal scaling in German is examined experimentally. Eighteen speakers uttered a total of 2277 sentences of the same syntactic structure, but with a varying number of constituents, word order and focus-given structure. The quantified results for German support findings for other Germanic languages that the scaling of high tones, and thus the entire melodic pattern, is influenced by information structure. Narrow focus raised the high tones of pitch accents, while givenness lowered them in prenuclear position and canceled them out postnuclearly. The effects of focus and givenness are calculated against all-new sentences as a baseline, which we expected to be characterized by downstep, a significantly lower scaling of high tones as compared to declination. The results further show that information structure alone cannot account for all variations. We therefore assume that dissimilatory tonal effects play a crucial role in the tonal scaling of German. The effects consist of final f0 drop, a steep fall from a raised high tone to the bottom line of the speaker, H-raising before a low tone, and H-lowering before a raised high tone. No correlation between word order and tone scaling could be established.

The syllable in optimality theory

1. Introduction Caroline Fery and Ruben van de Vijver Part I. Syllable Structure and Prosodic Structure: 2. Sympathy, cumulativity, and the Duke-of-York gambit John McCarthy 3. The controversy over geminates and syllable weight Stuart Davis 4. The syllable as a unit of prosodic organization in Japanese Haruo Kubozono 5. Prosodic weight Draga Zec Part II. Non-moraic Syllables and Syllable Edges: 6. Syllables and moras in Arabic Paul Kiparsky 7. Semi-syllables and universal syllabification Young-mee Cho and Tracy Holloway King 8. Onsets and non-moraic syllables in German Caroline Fery 9. Extrasyllabic consonants and onset well-formedness Antony Dubach Green 10. Beyond codas: word and phase-final alignment Caroline Wiltshire Part III. Segments and Syllables: 11. On the sources of opacity in OT: coda processes in German Junko Ito and Armin Mester 12. Ambisyllabicity and fricative voicing in West-Germanic dialects Marc van Oostendorp 13. The CiV generalization in Dutch: what Petunia, Mafia, and Sovjet tell us about Dutch syllable structure Ruben van de Vijver 14. The relative harmony of/s+stop/onsets: obstruent clusters and the sonority sequencing principle Frida Morelli Part IV. How Concrete is Phonotactics?: 15. The independent nature of phonotactic constraints: an alternative to syllable-based approaches Juliette Blevins.

The phonology of second occurrence focus

This paper investigates the question of whether and how Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) is realized phonetically in German. The apparent lack of phonetic marking on SOF has raised much discussion on the semantic theory of focus (Partee 1999, Rooth 1992). Some researchers have reported the existence of phonetic marking of SOF in the postnuclear area (Rooth 1996, Beaver et al. 2007). In our experimental study with German sentences, we examined sentences both with prenuclear SOF and with postnuclear SOF, comparing them with their first occurrence focus (FOF) and non-focus counterparts. The results show that the phonetic prominence of focus (higher pitch/longer duration) is realized differently according to the type of focus as well as according to the position of the target expression. We account for these differences by considering several phonetic effects, those that are information-structure-related and those that are phonologically motivated. (Less)

Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French

The quality of vowels in French depends to a large extent on the kind of syllables they are in. Tense vowels are often in open syllables and lax vowels in closed ones. This generalisation, which has been called loi de position in the literature, is often overridden by special vowel-consonant co-occurrence restrictions obscuring this law. The article shows first that the admission of semisyllables in the phonology of French explains a large number of counterexamples. Many final closing consonants on the phonetic representation can be understood as onsets of following rime-less syllables, opening in this way the last full syllable. Arguments coming from phonotactic regularities support this analysis. The second insight of the article is that Optimality Theory is a perfect framework to account for the intricate data bearing on the relationship between vowels and syllable structure. The loi de position is an effect dubbed Emergence of the Unmarked, instantiated only in case no higher-ranking constraint renders it inactive.

The focus and prosodic structure of German Right Node Raising and Gapping

Abstract Right Node Raising and Gapping consist of parallel sentential conjuncts, one of them being elliptical. The ellipsis is in the first conjunct in Right Node Raising and in the last conjunct in Gapping. We analyze ellipsis as the result of radical deaccentuation, to avoid superfluous repetition of phonetic material. In order to be well-formed, these constructions rely on a symmetric syntax, as well as on symmetrically accented material in the remnants, which we claim to be the result of contrastive focus (see Hartmann 2000). The new claim is that these constructions also need a special prosodic phrasing. Correlates of phrasing, like downstep, upstep and register scaling highlight the place of the ellipsis, especially in Right Node Raising where the ellipsis is at the end of the first conjunct. In this case, the hearer has to wait until the end of the second conjunct to be able to fill the gap. Much weaker correlates of phrasing are found in Gapping, since the ellipsis is in the second conjunct. There, the elided material has already been processed in the first conjunct, and the processing load is not so heavy. Our claims are supported by the results of production experiments.

Variation and gradience in phonetics and phonology

This book brings together researchers from sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology and provides an overview of current issues in variation and gradience in phonetics and phonology. In this book, variation at every level of phonological representation is addressed. It contributes to the growing interest in gradience and variation in theoretical phonology by combining research on the factors underlying variability and systematic quantitative results with theoretical phonological considerations.

A new approach to prosodic grouping

Abstract This paper reports on two experiments concerning the prosodic realization and perception of various sentences with three or four coordinated names in German. The expression of prosodic boundaries, as evidenced by pitch and duration, is shown to signal the depth of syntactic embedding of the conjuncts and also the branching direction of the co-ordination structure. The results of the production experiment inspire a model of syntax-prosody mapping, which assumes that the strength of a prosodic boundary after a given constituent is a function of a) the syntactic relation to the following constituent and b) the depth of its syntactic embedding. Comparison reveals that the proposed model provides better predictions than other current approaches to prosodic boundary strength. The perception experiment indicates that listeners recognize recursively embedded coordination structures on the basis of the prosodic form of the sentence. We argue for a recursive representation of prosodic constituent structure at the level of the phonological phrase and above.

Hierarchical prosodic structures in the intonation of center-embedded relative clauses

Abstract There is no doubt that recursion exists in syntax, but whether this is reflected in prosody is still an open question. In this paper, the prosody of sentences with syntactically recursive center-embedded clauses is examined empirically in two languages. On the basis of the results, we argue for recursion of higher prosodic domains in German. Evidence for this proposal comes from the F0 range of the matrix clause, which is larger if embedded material is present. It is both higher in the high regions and lower in the low regions than in matrix clauses without embedded material. A second piece of evidence relates to pitch scaling of high tones at the boundaries between clauses, which is sensitive to syntactic embedding. In Hindi, by contrast, no evidence for embedding of prosodic phrases could be found. Prosodic phrases are concatenated and are in a downstep relationship to each other, regardless of the syntactic structure of the sentence. The difference between the prosodic structure of German and Hindi is tentatively explained by their different intonational properties: German is an intonation language with lexical stress and Hindi is a phrase language without lexical stress, in which tonal structures are phrase-based.

Hierarchical organisation and tonal scaling

Ladd (1988) investigates configurations A[BC] vs. [AB]C of three English clauses containing clause-internal downstep. A sister-node relation between clauses (but not a sequential relation) leads to downstep among clauses, such that C is systematically lower than B in A[BC] but not in [AB]C. These findings are replicated here with German data. In addition, the German phenomenon of upstep (Truckenbrodt 2007b) arguably targets the phonetic reference line that models lowering among clauses (van den Berg et al. 1992). We show that both Ladds and our results also support Selkirks (2011) suggestion that root sentences/illocutionary clauses can be interpreted as matched to intonational phrases (not just aligned with them, as in Downing 1970). The results also suggest that, in addition to downstep among intonational phrases, phrase-final lowering takes place.

Postfocal Downstep in German

This article is a follow-up study of Féry and Kügler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680–703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account.