Contrastive Focus vs. Discourse-new: Evidence from Phonetic Prominence in English

This article presents new evidence from English that the theory of grammar makes a distinction between the contrastive focus and discourse-new status of constituents. The evidence comes from a phonetic investigation which compares the prosody of all-new sentences with the prosody of sentences combining contrastive focus and discourse-new constituents. We have found that while the sentences of these different types in our experimental materials are not distinguished in their patterns of distribution of pitch accents and phonological phrase organization, they do differ in patterns of phonetic prominence—duration, pitch and intensity, which vary according to the composition of the sentence in terms of contrastive and/or new constituents. The central new finding is that contrastive focus constituents are more phonetically prominent than discourse new constituents that are contained within the same sentence. These distinctions in phonetic prominence are plausibly the consequence of distinctions in the phonological representation of phrasal prosodic prominence (stress) for contrastive focus and discourse-new constituents in English.