Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T00:52:15.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The phonology of Second Occurrence Focus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2009

CAROLINE FÉRY  and
SHINICHIRO ISHIHARA
CAROLINE FÉRY*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam
SHINICHIRO ISHIHARA*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam
*
Authors' address: SFB632 ‘Information Structure’, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24–25, 14476 Golm, Germany[email protected]
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 285 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

Some parts of this paper were presented at Phonetics & Phonology 2 in Tübingen, a Research Center (SFB) 632 Internal Workshop, North-Eastern Linguistic Society (NELS) 36 in Amherst, and the 23rd English Linguistic Society in Japan (ELSJ) Conference in Fukuoka. We would like to thank three anonymous JL referees, as well as the following people for their comments and discussion: David Beaver, Daniel Büring, Gisbert Fanselow, Ingo Feldhausen, Manfred Krifka, Frank Kügler, Mats Rooth, Shravan Vasishth and Ede Zimmermann. Many thanks also to Felix Engelmann, Elisabeth Fleischhauer, Susanne Gensel, Kristin Irsig, Pawel Logatschew and Esther Sommerfeld for their help with the experiments and data analysis, and to the JL editorial team, Kirsten Brock and Joseph DeVeaugh-Geiss for checking and correcting the final version. This study is part of the SFB632 ‘Information Structure’ funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) (project A1).

References

REFERENCES

Bartels, Christine. 2004. Acoustic correlates of ‘second occurrence’ focus: Towards an experimental investigation. In Kamp, & Partee, (eds.), 354–361.Google Scholar
Beaver, David B., Clark, Brady Zack, Flemming, Edward, Jaeger, T. Florian & Wolters, Maria. 2007. When semantics meets phonetics: Acoustical studies of second occurrence focus. Language 83, 245–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & David, Weenink. 1994–2009. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 4.4.20) [Computer program]. http://www.praat.org/ (retrieved in 2004).Google Scholar
Bosch, Peter & van der Sandt, Rob (eds.). 1999. Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Büring, Daniel. 2006. Been there, marked that: A tentative theory of second occurrence focus. Ms., UCLA.Google Scholar
Fanselow, Gisbert & Frisch, Stefan. 2005. Effects of processing difficulty on judgements of acceptability. In Fanselow, Gisbert, Féry, Caroline, Vogel, Ralph & Schlesewsky, Matthias (eds.), Gradience in grammar: Generative perspectives, 291–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Féry, Caroline & Ishihara, Shinichiro. 2009. How syntax and information structure shape prosody. In Zimmermann, & Féry, (eds.), 36–63.Google Scholar
Féry, Caroline & Kügler, Frank. 2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics 36, 680–703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Féry, Caroline & Samek-Lodovici, V.. 2006. Focus projection and prosodic prominence in nested foci. Language 82.1, 131–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fintel, Kai von. 2004. A minimal theory of adverbial quantification. In Kamp, & Partee, (eds.), 137–175.Google Scholar
Ishihara, Shinichiro. 2004. Prosody by phase: Evidence from the focus intonation–wh-scope correspondence in Japanese. In Ishihara, Shinichiro, Schmitz, Michaela & Schwarz, Anne (eds.), Interdisciplinary studies on information structure (Working Papers of the SFB 632, vol. 1), 77–119. Potsdam: University of Potsdam.Google Scholar
Ishihara, Shinichiro & Féry, Caroline. 2006. Phonetic correlates of second occurrence focus. In Davis, Chris, Deal, Amy Rose & Zabbal, Youri (eds.), North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 36, 371–384. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray S. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. Florian. 2004. Only always associates audibly, even if only is repeated: The prosodic properties of second occurrence focus in English. Ms., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Kamp, Hans & Partee, Barbara H. (eds.). 2004. Context-dependence in the analysis of linguistic meaning. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Kohler, Klaus J. 1990. Macro and micro F0 in the synthesis of intonation. In Kingston, John & Beckman, Mary E. (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the grammar and the physics of speech, 115–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2004. Focus and/or context: A second look at second occurrence expressions. In Kamp, & Partee, (eds.), 187–207.Google Scholar
Partee, Barbara Hall. 1999. Focus, quantification, and semantics–pragmatics issues. In Bosch, & van der Sandt, (eds.), 213–231.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1980. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1, 75–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 1996. On the interface principles for intonational focus. In Galloway, Teresa & Spence, Justin (eds.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) VI, 202–226. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 1999. Association with focus or association with presupposition? In Bosch, & van der Sandt, (eds.), 232–244.Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 2004. Comments on Krifka's paper. In Kamp, & Partee, (eds.), 475–487.Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 2009. Second occurrence focus and relativized stress F. In Zimmermann, & Féry, (eds.), 15–35.Google Scholar
Sugahara, Mariko. 2003. Downtrends and post-FOCUS intonation in Japanese. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Uhmann, Susanne. 1991. Fokusphonologie: Eine Analyse deutscher Intonationskonturen im Rahmen der nicht-linearen Phonologie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Malte & Féry, Caroline (eds.). 2009. Information structure from different perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar