Focus Projection and Prosodic Prominence in Nested Foci

This paper investigates prosodic exceptions to rightmost stress in English nested foci. We concentrate on sentences involving discourse-novel material, where the absence of rightmost stress cannot follow from the discourse-given status of the relevant rightmost constituent. We show that these cases cannot be accounted for by an analysis directly linking pitch accents to focus projections via F-marking as proposed in Selkirk (1995) and Schwarzschild (1999). Rather they follow from the optimality theoretic interaction of the constraints governing the prosodic expression of discourse status with the constraints governing the location of prosodic prominence within prosodic phrases.