The Distribution and Realization of H Tones in Bengali

The current study examines the realization and distribution of high (H) tones in Bengali across different sentence types and under varying focus domain sizes, to show that Bengali tonally marks three prosodic phrases above the word instead of two – Intonation Phrases (IP), Intermediate Phrases (ip), and Accentual Phrases (AP) – and that focus realization can be derived without the lexically-specified tonal morphemes or the additional stipulations on prosodic boundary placement proposed in previous models.