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The phonology of Second Occurrence Focus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2009

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, Germanycaroline.fery@googlemail.com

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
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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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

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