Semantic vs. Prosodic Prominence – Pronouns Realisation in spontaneous Mono- and Bilingual English

Abstract

The phonological realisation of pronouns (reduced vs. explicit) is conditioned by information structure. The choice of a reduced expression depends on the availability in a language. In stress languages like English PRONs are generally unstressed, while focus allows for stressed forms. Pro-drop languages like Turkish, make a distinction between null and overt pronouns. The availability of two structures in bilinguals is prone to transfer. A recent study on spontaneous intonation reported stressed non-focused pronouns in English (Böttcher & Zerbian, 2020). Their bilingual group comprised speakers from different language background (including pro-drop languages) which is taken up in this study. The present paper presents an analysis of prosodically prominent PRONs and their relation to contrastive focus in spontaneous English narrations by 4 mono- and 16 bilingual speakers (Russian, Turkish, Greek, German) from the RUEG corpus. Speakers of all groups produced stressed PRONs independent of contrast related to the previously reported aspects of prosodic phrasing. Bilinguals frequently left contrastive pronouns unmarked, avoiding stress realisations, while monolinguals marked contrastive PRONs prosodically. The results are in line with the overall tendency for bilingual speakers’ prosody to follow unmarked structural constraints (eg. phrasing) rather than marked pragmatic constraints (MHD, cf. Zerbian, 2015).