Focus projection revisited: Pitch accent perception in German

One of the important insights of the recent intensive study of information structure is that for intonation languages like English and German, there is a close relation between focus and prosodic prominence. More specifically, it is now widely accepted as a fact that in such languages focus is signaled by pitch accents. But one issue that is still much discussed is the nature of pitch accent placement in the focussed part of an utterance: is it determined by syntactic, pragmatic, or purely metrical factors or a combination of these? One line of research has established that there are syntactic rules that determine accent placement in focus structures, with the F-marking approach of Selkirk (1995) and the SAAR (Sentence Accent Assignment Rule) of Gussenhoven (1983) serving as prominent foundations. One prediction of these approaches is that certain accent patterns are ambiguous with respect to the possible focus domain: a pitch accent in a certain position can signal focus just on one word (narrow focus) or on a larger constituent (broad focus). The empirical question that arises from this claim is: is there any evidence that these accent patterns are really perceived as ambiguous between different focus interpretations by listeners? In this chapter, we report on a perception experiment for German in which we tested whether listeners judge certain accent patterns as equally acceptable in different focus structure contexts. The results of the study will give an indication whether listeners perceive pitch accents in certain positions as ambiguous with respect to the possible information structuring of an utterance.