Tonal and Articulatory Markers of Second Occurrence Focus in German

Recent production studies on the prosodic marking in German of differ-ent types of focus (contrastive vs. non-contrastive) as well as different sizes of focus domains (broad vs. narrow) revealed that speakers make use of a wide variety of prominence-lending cues for encoding differ-ences in information structure [1]. Results suggest that an increase in prominence – from broad through narrow to contrastive focus – is achieved by tonal means such as rising nuclear pitch accents and higher and later accent peaks as well as by increased acoustic duration and, for the difference between broad and narrow focus, by increased articulatory effort (localised hyperarticulation) in vowels. In the study reported on here, we investigate the tonal and articulatory marking of a specific type of focus, namely `second occurrence focus´ (SOF). SOF is indicated morpho-syntactically by a focus sensitive op-erator like only or even, and is contextually given (in contrast to first oc-currence focus (FOF), which is contextually new). It has been claimed that SOF, in contrast to FOF, is not marked by a pitch accent [6]. This claim could be confirmed for German [5] and, par-tially, for American English [2]. Nevertheless, SOF was found to be prosodically marked by increased acoustic duration and intensity of the focussed item. For German, [5] found a significant durational difference between SOF and Background (SOF items being longer). For our study, the sequences in (1) served as test material. The re-spective target word (a fictitious surname) contained one of the four long vowels /a:/, /i:/, /o: / or /u: / in its stressed syllable and occurred as the last non-pronominal argument in the utterance. (1) a. Heutzutage besitzt fast jeder ein Handy. (Today, nearly everyone has a mobile phone.) b. Jetzt hat sogar [Dr. Bieber]FOF so eins. (Now, even Dr. Bieber has one of those.) c. Ich kann gar nicht glauben, dass sogar [Dr. Bieber]SOF so eins hat. (I just can’t believe that even Dr. Bieber has one of those.