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Georgian is famous for its word order flexibility: all permutations of constituent order are possible and the choice among them is primarily determined by information structure. In this paper, we show that word order is not the only means to encode information structure in this language, but it is used in combination with sentence prosody. After a preliminary description of the use of prosodic phrasing and intonation for this purpose, we address the question of the interrelation between these two strategies. Based on experimental evidence, we investigate the interaction of focus with word order and prosody, and we conclude that some aspects of word order variation are pragmatically vacuous and can be accommodated in any context if they are realized with an appropriate prosodic structure, while other word order phenomena are quite restrictive and cannot be overridden through prosodic manipulations.
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 oil 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.
Sisterhood and tonal scaling
(2005)
This paper discusses central aspects of the effects of hierarchical structure on tonal scaling in intonation. The core results of a number of phonetic studies on this topic, by Ladd, by van den Berg, Gussenhoven and Rietveld, as well as experimental results of our own, are reviewed. We review the suggestions of this earlier work and argue for an addition to the theory. The principle 'The deeper the steeper' says that downstep among sister nodes is relatively larger if these sister-nodes are relatively more deeply embedded in the prosodic representation