Syntactic-Prosodic Interface in Information Structure: The Interplay between Syntactic Markedness and Prosodic Prominence of Focus

Abstract

There is a vast body of research that attempts to get a window into the information structure-prosody interface. These accounts take a simplistic view and examine the prosody of information structure divorced from syntax. The current study postulates that the prosodic encoding of information structure is constrained by some syntactic factors. The basic hypothesis of the study is that syntactic markedness, as an independent syntactic variable, contributes to the eventual prosodic encoding of focus, particularly its prosodic prominence. Given that marked focus constituents basically manipulate syntax in such a way as to stand out syntagmatically, the study hypothesizes that syntactically unmarked focus constituents are predicted to be more prosodically prominent than marked constituents and, as a corollary, are predicted to be realized with higher maximum pitch, higher scaling of the H tonal target of the focus accent compared to the H of the preceding and following accents, and lower scaling of the L tonal target. To test these hypotheses, the study provides a prosodic investigation of two data sets that feature marked focus constructions and unmarked ones. The results of the study show that syntactic markedness is a highly significant predictor for focus prosody