Contrastive accent in dialogue : towards a presuppositional analysis

Emiel Krahmer and Marc Swerts IPO, Center for Research on User-System Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology fe.j.krahmer/m.g.j.swertsg@tue.nl 1 PROLOGUE What is the meaning of contrastive accents in dialogue? To answer this question, a number of hurdles have to be taken. To begin with, there is still no consensus in the prosodic literature whether a separately identifiable contrastive intonation exists in the first place. So, before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to try and answer a different question: do dialogue participants distinguish contrastive accents from other kinds of accents? While there are various answers to the first question (e.g., Rooth 1992, Hendriks and Dekker 1995, van Deemter 1999, Piwek 1998), this paper is to the best of our knowledge the first where both questions are addressed in combination