Where to Associate Stressed Additive Particles? : Evidence from Speech Prosody

Abstract

Theoretical approaches mostly associate stressed additive particles (e.g., auch in German) with contrastive topics. Empirical data show that these associated constituents (ACs) are produced more prominently than unassociated ones; however, they are not produced as contrastive topics. This paper compares the prosodic realizations of ACs, contrastive and non-contrastive topics. We found no differences in accent types but later alignment for contrastive than non-contrastive topics; ACs lie in-between. An unrestricted sentence completion task tested whether listener produce more additive particles upon hearing fragments with contrastive compared to non-contrastive topics. Completions containing additive particles were generally very rare, but cru-cially more frequent in sentences with a contrastive topic compared to a non-contrastive topic. We conclude that stressed additive particles associate with prominent accents, which may often be contrastive topics.