On the Tonal Disambiguation of Focus Structures  

Oleh:

Uhmann, Susanne

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 8 no. 3 (Aug. 1991), page 219-238.
Topik: Tonal Disambiguation; Focus Structures
Fulltext: vol 8, no 3, p 219-238.pdf (749.93KB)

Isi artikel

In this article I will be concerned with certain well-known ambiguities of focus structures arising from a special accentuation of phrases or sentences. This ambiguity has been discussed under the heading focus projection1 in the literature. What is generally understood by focus projection goes back to Chomsky (1971) and maybe even to Hermann Paul (1880)—'avant la lettre'. Chomsky (1971: 201) observed that in a sentence such as (1) was he (warned (to look out for (an exconvict (with a red (SHIRT))))) any of the constituents in brackets may be regarded as a focus. The presence of the foci is indicated by an intonation centre placed on the constituent shirt. Although I in principle share Hohle's view,2 who underlines the importance of formulating the rules for focus projection, I am not going to deal here with the rules governing focus projection, the origin of focus, or the problem of focus assignment in detail. My main interests in this article are instead concerned with the tonal realization of sentences. The question I will try to answer will be the following: does the ambiguity stated on the accentual level also show on the intonational level? To answer this question I will examine four aspects of the tonal realization more closely. 1. the internal structure of the intonational phrases; (i.e. the number of pitch accents and their choice from the inventory of German pitch accents); 2. the initial boundary of the intonarional phrases; 3. the pitch range; 4. the association of syllables and pitch accents.

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