TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kuegler, Frank
A1  - Fery, Caroline
T1  - Postfocal Downstep in German
JF  - Language and speech
N2  - This article is a follow-up study of Fery and Kugler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680-703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account.
KW  - German intonation
KW  - postfocal givenness
KW  - downstep
KW  - pitch register
KW  - postfocal compression
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830916647204
SN  - 0023-8309
SN  - 1756-6053
VL  - 60
SP  - 260
EP  - 288
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  -