Prosodic Variability in Lexical Sequences: Intonation Entrenches Too

This paper investigates the relationship between the probability with which a word appears in a given lexical context and the prosodic variability of that word. Regression analyses indicate that the higher the probability of a word in its lexical context, the lower the variability in the pitch accent realisation of that word (if accented), and the lower the variability in the prosodic pattern around the word. These results imply that prosodic realisation can be subject to lexicalised entrenchment, extending previous findings within the Exemplar Theory framework on the phonetic properties of collocations, but contrary to the usual assumption that prosody is “post-lexical” in English.