Pitch accents and information status in a German radio news corpus

This paper presents a corpus analysis of prosodic realisations of information status categories in terms of pitch accent types. The annotations base on a recent annotation scheme for information status [1] that is based on semantic criteria applied to written text. For each information status category, typical pitch accent realisations are identified. Moreover, the relevance of the strict semantic information status labelling scheme on the prosodic realisation is examined. It can be shown that the semantic criteria are reflected in prosody, i.e. the prosodic findings corroborate the theoretical assumptions made in the framework.