Phonetics and phonology of contrast marking in german : Issues for the prosody-semantics interface

Various researchers have proposed that contrastive topics in German are realised by a particular intonation contour (Wunderlich, 1991; Jacobs, 1997; Büring, 1997b). This particular intonation contour (which is shown in the lower part of figure 1) was originally discussed under the term "hat pattern" for Dutch (Cohen and t'Hart, 1967). We shall describe a production experiment here that was designed to elicit German utterances in contrastive and neutral contexts. We will argue that the difference between contrastive and neutral utterances is not based on distinctive intonation contours (i.e. hat pattern vs. not hat pattern) but that it manifests itself mostly in local, more subtle acoustic differences, such as the characteristics of the pitch rise, durational properties or the accent type of the second accent. Since different "types" of pitch rises (with different .. functions) have been proposed by some ;1uthors (Fery, 1993; Jacobs, 1997), we conducted an intersubjective prosodic annotation of some rising accents in our data. This revealed that in most cases there is no phonological difference between the rising accents in contrastive and neutral contexts, which poses problems for current proposals of a prosody-semantics interface