Prosodic marking of information status in Italian

Abstract

Previous studies on the prosodic marking of information status argue that Italian tends to resist deaccentuation of given elements. In particular, Italian reportedly always accents post-focal given information within noun phrases (NPs), so that it is not possible to reliably reconstruct the information status of the items from the acoustic signal. However, descriptions have so far been concerned with categorical accent patterns, lacking crucial information about continuous phonetic parameters and their distribution in the utterance in ways that can contribute to prosodic marking. In this paper, we use a novel approach based on periodic-energy-related measures to explore how speakers of the Neapolitan variety of Italian modulate continuous prosodic parameters to differentiate information structure. We show that, contrary to previous findings, Italian speakers of the Neapolitan variety do mark information status prosodically within noun phrases. The discrepancy with previous work is explained by the fact that the prosodic marking of post-focal givenness is not achieved through the categorical presence or absence of a pitch accent on one specific syllable, but through the gradual modulation of phonetic parameters at various locations. Moreover, we find that these modulations occur early in the noun phrase. We also show that native speakers can make use of their knowledge of these modulations to reliably identify post-focal given elements in the absence of the pragmatic context, that is, directly from the acoustic signal.