The Prosody of Contrastive Topic and Focus in Spoken English

On the one hand, these different researchers differ from each other in identifying exactly what the prosodic correlate of topic/theme is. Büring (2002: 27) and Kadmon (2001: 380), following Pierrehumbert (1980), suggest that ‘contrastive topics’ are realized by an entire tune, either H* LH% or L+H*LH%. Steedman (2000) associates his ‘theme’ with the pitch accent L+H*. Gundel & Fretheim (in press) also associate L+H* with their notion of ‘topic’. There is thus some controversy concerning the prosodic realization of the topic/theme accent: is it simply a complex pitch accent, L+H*, or is it an entire fall-rise tune, (L+)H*LH%? I won’t attempt to resolve this phonological issue here. Rather I’ll just cite attested examples from natural discourse containing various combinations of pitch accent and boundary tone.