Contrastive FOCUS vs. presentational focus: prosodic evidence from right node raising in English

Abstract

This paper reports a difference in English between the prosodic properties of contrastive FOCUS and presentational focus entities when they are immediately followed within the sentence by a presentational focus.In this context, the contrastive FOCUS shows not only a L+H* pitch accent, but also a following phonological phrase break, marked by both a L-phrase accent and temporal disjuncture.In the same context, presentational focus shows a pitch accent H* and no phonological phrase break (no L-and no disjuncture).Since these differences in prosody correlating with different Focus types are not plausibly construed as the realization of distinct tonal morphemes, I suggest that the contrastive/presentational contrast is present in the interface informational/syntactic structure itself, and makes itself felt in the phonological representation through the action of syntax-phonology interface constraints which distinguish the two Focus types.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 153 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.