In the present study we investigated the phenomenon of Verum Focus, a contrast in the polarity of an utterance, which is typically marked by a pitch accent on the finite verb in Germanic languages (i.e. the child IS tearing the banknote as an opposite claim to the child is not tearing the banknote, Höhle, 1992; Klein, 1998, 2006). By using a semi-spontaneous task in mini-dialogue form, we tested how intonation marks the relation between Verum Focus and monosyllabic auxiliaries, i.e.
phonologically weak forms, in German and French. Going one step further, we also touched upon more specific issues regarding the phonology of these two languages, which were discussed in more detail in the respective discussion sections above.
The first part of the investigation conducted on German (Experiment 1) confirmed previous semantic/pragmatic proposals on the relationship between finiteness (finite verb), polarity focus and accent placement (cf. Höhle, 1992; Klein, 1998, 2006). The functional importance that finite elements play in Germanic languages (cf. Bernini, 2009; Dimroth et al., 2010) is signaled by a systematic accentual prominence on the finite form of the verb. Compared to cases where the aux-iliary is by default unaccented (i.e. non-Verum Focus condition), German speakers typically pro-duced a nuclear pitch accent (H* L-) on the auxiliary hat in Verum Focus contexts; the auxiliary was hence promoted as the carrier of the assertion validation. Phonologically speaking, in terms of accent placement and accent type, the intonational realizations were quite consistent with previous studies on focus-marking in German (e.g. Baumann et al., 2006; Féry & Kügler, 2008). Another way to mark Verum Focus is via hat pattern contours, whose presence in more spontaneous speech was attested for the first time in this study. However, these contours were only rarely produced by German speakers. Even though this tonal pattern has been argued to facilitate the production of accents in close succession (Levelt, 1989 for Dutch), our German speakers chose to phrase both contrasts (i.e. on the topic and on the polarity) separately in the majority of the cases. A further aspect that deserves attention is the presence of “ornamental accents” (Büring, 2006, 2007) on the contextually given subject nouns, which were probably realized due to rhythmic organization prin-ciples. As a side remark, it is interesting to notice that even in a language like German, where there is a strong relation between intonation and information structure, structural/rhythmic principles can outweigh pragmatic aspects (i.e. the activation status of referents, cf. Baumann & Grice, 2006), at least in prenuclear position.
The interaction between structural and pragmatic factors was also observed in French (Experi-ment 2). In this language, phrasing and tonal constraints might work against the representation of Verum Focus as a typical case of intonational narrow focus expressed on the monosyllabic auxil-iary. Following previous work on the interface between intonation and information structure, it was predicted that if auxiliaries were the carriers of the assertion validation (i.e. in Verum Focus con-texts), this pragmatic function would be marked by the presence of a focal accent. In order to associate Hf with the auxiliary, the default tonal pattern of the accentual phrase (i.e. LHiLH*) has
to be phonologically restructured, and constraints against placing initial accents on monosyllabic phrase-initial function words need to be outweighed. Our findings indeed show that in 33.3% of the Verum Focus cases the auxiliary was realized with a focal accent (Hf). In another 15.9% of the cases, a focal accent was realized on one of the first syllables of the non-finite verb (i.e. LHiL*, LHi) with no following AP-final accent – again, these accent types only occurred in Verum Focus cases. Hence, in half of the cases, French speakers phonologically distinguished Verum Focus from non-Verum Focus on the verbal construction. While some of these accentual realizations (i.e.
LHiL*, LHi) have been already reported in previous work on narrow focus marking (e.g. Jun and Fougeron, 2000), this study is the first to show the presence of a focal accent on mono-syllabic function words (i.e. HiLH*, HiLL*).
Overall, if we compare the two languages in question, we get a clear understanding of how Verum Focus is typically marked in German, whereas for French, the unsystematic occurrence of the focal accent on the auxiliary and the wide range of intonational patterns realized within the targeted AP (including the finite and non-finite verb) open a new field for future work. As a pre-liminary conclusion, we think that the functional importance ascribed to the finite elements in Germanic languages either may not be attributable to French, as suggested by recent cross-linguis-tics studies on Germanic and Romance languages (cf. Bernini, 2009; Dimroth et al., 2010), or simply does not surface most of the times due to phonological constraints of the auxiliary, which is a phonologically weak element. The quite frequent occurrence of phonological differences for Verum and non-Verum Focus contexts and further phonetic differences in peak scaling across con-texts lends support to the latter assumption. But in the end, more data (also from online speech perception studies) is necessary to adjudicate between these two explanations.
Obviously, the current results have implications for (tutored and untutored) second language acquisition (L2). Given the differential results for German and French Verum Focus marking and widely attested effects of L1 prosodic “transfer” on L2 (e.g. Braun & Tagliapietra, 2011; Mennen, 2004; Rasier & Hiligsmann, 2007), the intonational marking of Verum Focus can represent a learn-ability problem for learners of both languages.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Tilman Harpe for help with the pictures, and Johan Weustink for programming the experiment. Furthermore, we are deeply indebted to Mariapaola D’Imperio, Bob Ladd and Barbara Hem-forth, as well as to two anonymous reviewers for very insightful and detailed comments on previous ver-sions of this paper.
Funding
This research is part of a PhD project of the first author funded by the ANR-DFG project “LANGACROSS”
(DI 808/1-1, awarded to Christine Dimroth).
Notes
1. Other focus readings are also possible, like a reply to a yes–no question or a focus on the temporal aspect of the action, but they will not be discussed here. For details, see Klein (1998, 2006).
2. The same phenomenon is also referred to as polarity focus (e.g. Dik, 1981; Gussenhoven, 1983;
Holmberg, 2007), auxiliary focus (Hyman & Watters, 1984) or predicate/predication focus (Güldemann, 2003).
3. In the German and French utterances, the elicited verb construction is inflected in present perfect tense (i.e. the auxiliary followed by a non-finite verb). In English a direct translation in the present perfect would be ungrammatical as the presence of the utterance-initial adverbial construction (In my picture) requires a simple past tense. The correct English translations of the German and French stimuli are provided in Appendix. However, throughout the paper, the English translations will be given in the
progressive form (-ing construction), rather than the past tense as this allows us to preserve the analytical construction of the verb (i.e. finite verb plus non-finite verb).
4. This prosodic unit is known by many names, see Lacheret-Dujour and Beaugendre (1999) for a review.
5. For an analysis of the other conditions see Turco (2013).
6. Audio file examples of the confederate speaker’s productions are provided online at the following web-site: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/braun/forschung.html.
7. Kappa was calculated by using the following formula: Kappa = (Po − Pc) / (1 − Pc). The observed percent-age of agreement (Po) is the proportion of ratings where the raters agree on accent types. The expected percentage (Pc) is the proportion of agreements that are expected to occur by chance, as a result of the raters scoring in a random way. Thus, Kappa is calculated as the proportion of agreements that is actually observed between raters, after adjusting for the proportion of agreements that occur by chance.
8. Due to the small data set, downstepped and upstepped accents such as !H*L- and ^H*L- were collapsed into the category H*L-.
9. The initial accent is also called a secondary stress or secondary accent (Fónagy, 1979; Pasdeloup, 1990), rhythmic regulatory stress (Delais-Roussarie, 1994), etc. The final accent is also referred to as primary stress, primary accent (Fónagy, 1979; Pasdeloup, 1990), internal accent (Rossi, 1993), etc.
10. Note that the French “bridge accent” should not be confused with the German “bridge accent” or “hat pattern”.
11. Other researchers (Di Cristo, 1998, 1999, 2000; Post, 2000) argue that both accents are pitch accents.
12. We mention here only a few of the studies investigating factors on the presence of initial accents: speak-ing rate (e.g. Welby, 2006), speaker idiosyncrasies (Pasdeloup, 1990), syntactic constituency (Astésano, Bard, & Turk, 2007), information structure (German & D’Imperio, 2010), etc.
13. Note that a function word can get an initial accent if disyllabic (e.g. Delais-Roussarie, 1995; Jun &
Fougeron, 2002), or in cases of APs containing a long sequence of unstressed function words in a row (e.g. Delais-Roussarie, 1995; Dell, 1984; Mertens, 1987; Pasdeloup, 1990). Furthermore, the initial accent can be located on a function word depending on the category this belongs to (i.e. negation adverbs, de-monstrative, tonic and relative pronouns can get accented, Delais-Roussarie, 1995, 1999; Mertens, 1993, among others) and its phrase-internal position (i.e. proclitics are never realized with an initial accent but enclitics can be pitch accented, e.g. Delais-Roussarie, 1999; Mertens, 1993).
14. Also called “accent of focalization” (Rossi, 1993), “emphatic accent” (Dahan & Bernard, 1996), “emphatic initial accent” (accent initiale emphatique, cf. Di Cristo, 1999, 2000), etc.
15. In a different approach by Féry (2001), phrasing is regarded as the primary strategy for marking focus in French: the narrowly focused constituent tends to be phrased on its own; otherwise syntactic phrases and accentual phrases typically coincide. Because the author regards initial and final accents as edge tones (and not as pitch accents), this account excludes the possibility of a direct projection of different information structures (broad vs. narrow focus) on the tonal realizations of the APs.
16. Initial and late elbows were identified semi-automatically and hand-corrected by using the procedure described in Welby (2006, p. 351).
17. Since a binomial logistic regression model cannot be calculated if there are no instances in a given condi-tion, we replaced one instance without initial rise on the FW with a “Yes” in the NVF condition (Braun &
Chen, 2010, footnote 3). The factor speaker could not be added as a fixed factor because of too few data points. However, if the presence of initial accent were due to speaker preferences, we would not see a main effect of condition.
18. Following Nolan (2003), the semitone difference was calculated as 12(log2H1 – log2H2).
19. A linear mixed effect model (Baayen, 2008) with semitone difference as dependent variable, number of syllables as predictor, and speaker and item added as crossed random factors revealed no effect of num-ber of syllables on the semitone difference (p = 0.9).
20. A further tonal pattern, implemented by Welby (2006) in Jun and Fougeron’s model, is the L2H* (i.e.
[LHi]LH*). This is realized as a rise from the late L (here indicated as L2) to the late H. Welby (2006) uses the L2 notation to distinguish the L2H* accent pattern from the LH* accent pattern (i.e. a rise from the initial L to the late H). In Table 5 the L2H* is not displayed in that we chose to illustrate only those tonal patterns that were realized on the accentual phrases investigated here.
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Appendix: German and French elicited utterances in the experimental setting of the polarity-switch dialogue
Table A1. German materials including information on the number of syllables of the non-finite verb. In the stimuli, non-finite verbs are printed in bold (and underlined in the equivalent English translation). Glosses are provided for the first utterance only.
Non-finite verb syllable number Elicited utterances
2 Auf meinem Bild hat die Frau die Blume gepflückt In my picture has the-f.sg lady-f.sg the-f.sg flower-f.sg picked
“In my picture the lady picked the flower”
3 Auf meinem Bild hat der Junge den Reifen zerstochen
“In my picture the boy punched the tyre”
2 Auf meinem Bild hat der Waldarbeiter den Baum gefällt
“In my picture the lumberjack knocked down the tree”
3 Auf meinem Bild hat das Kind die Bonbons gegessen
3 Auf meinem Bild hat das Kind die Bonbons gegessen