Optimal accentuation of a sentence involves accentuating a minimal set of words which in a given context suffices for understanding the entire sentence. We propose a model of the interpretation of incomplete or not entirely recognized utterances. Using this model, we determine which constituents of an utterance have to be accentuated given a certain context. 1. Optimal Accentuation Our basic as...

This study aims at examining the accentual and phrasing properties of a variety of L2 French commonly called “Français Fédéral”, a variety of French spoken in Switzerland by speakers who have a Swiss-German dialect as a mother tongue. For this, we compared the data of 4 groups of 4 speakers: 2 groups of 4 native French speakers from Neuchâtel and from Paris, and 2 groups of 4 Swiss-German Frenc...

A Bulgarian and a German sentence were presented to Bulgarian and German listeners together with a question which either expected an early narrow focus or a late narrow focus. The answering sentences were manipulated so that the word in the latefocused position ranged from completely de-accented to strongly accented. The early focused position was neutral, allowing latefocus perception with lat...

This paper explores the interplay of source correlates of accentuation, examining a hypothesis (the Voice Prominence Hypothesis) that different source parameters are involved and may serve as equivalent. It predicts that where accentuation is not marked by pitch salience there will be more extensive changes in other source parameters. This follows our assumption that prosodic entities such as a...

COMPOSITIONAL approaches to mobile accentuation of the Indo-European type derive the accent of words from the lexically specified accentual features of their constituent morphemes, together with the BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE (BAP), which erases all accents but the leftmost one, and assigns an accent to the left edge of an unaccented domain.1 I propose here a compositional analysis in which B...