Information-structural surprises? Contrast, givenness, and (the lack of) accent shift and deaccentuation in non-assertive speech acts

Abstract

It is well-established for assertions that the information-structural status of referents influences prosodic prominence: givenness reduces and contrastive focus increases prominence. We present production data in German on the prosodic marking of givenness and contrast in comparison to newness in two non-assertive speech acts: polar exclamatives and polar questions. The results show that contrastive focus is consistently marked in both speech acts: through an increase of prosodic prominence on the contrastive element itself, and through a decrease of prominence of a word in the prenuclear region that in sentences without contrast typically is prominent. Givenness is not clearly marked prosodically in either speech act. We argue that givenness is necessary, but not sufficient for deaccentuation. First, if deaccentuation requires an accent shift (so that the intonation phrase is headed), the semantic-pragmatic effects of the shifted accent must fit the discourse context. We argue that there are subtle discourse conditions on accent shift in the questions involving VERUM focus, which prevent a shift. Second, deaccentuation is disfavored if speech act marking requires accentuation, as in exclamatives. Overall, the different functions of prosody show subtle interactions, which hint at a subordinate functional load of givenness marking but not of contrast marking.

Keywords

• information structure
• prosody
• exclamatives
• questions
• German
• VERUM