Focusing on Function Words: Intonational Means to Mark Verum Focus in German and French

Recent studies have shown that in French initial accents occur more frequently at the start of a focus domain. We investigated whether this tendency also holds when the focus domain starts with an auxiliary (since function words have a different prosodic status than content words). We therefore compared semi-spontaneous utterances in Verum Focus, which signals a contrast in response to a claim with opposite polarity (e.g., The child IS eating the candies in the context of a child not eating the candies) and predicate focus in French and German, two languages that differ in how prosody is used to mark information structure. Results showed that both groups differentiated the conditions prosodically, Germans more consistently than French speakers. In French, categorically distinct accent patterns were realized across contexts in half of the cases. Some of these accent patterns involved an emphatic initial accent on the auxiliary. The other half of the Verum focused verb phrases showed to be phonologically similar but phonetically different from non-Verum focus cases. Pragmatic differences are hence also signaled in French even though this is not so systematic as in German.