Focus and Prosodic Cues in Hungarian Noun Phrases

This study investigates the prosodic patterns of complex noun phrases in Hungarian in order to disentangle the roles of structural (syntactic) and prosodic prominence. While Hungarian has fixed syntactic positions for (narrow, exclusive) focus and topic, the structural marking of information structure cannot disambiguate multiple possible interpretations when the focus position is filled with complex phrases. We conducted a production study with complex noun phrases in the syntactic focus position, where contexts elicited either focus on the whole phrase or only on parts of it (e.g. only the noun). Our results show that while there is predominantly consistent prosodic marking of the left-edge of the syntactic focus position, there are different prosodic patterns in the NP depending on the position and the domain of focus. Thus, despite the structurally prominent syntactic focus position in Hungarian, prosodic prominence marking plays an independent role in focus marking.