Remarks on Sentence Prosody and Topic-Focus Articulation

Abstract

The topic-focus articulation can be understood as one of the aspects of the underlying structure of the sentence and as expressed by sentence prosody and word order. While the intonation center (the final falling or rising-falling cadence of a declarative sentence) is carried by the focus, the topic often has a contrastive value, which is expressed by a high or raising phrasal stress. A focus sensitive particle is associated with the focus of the sentence in the prototypical case, but in secondary cases it occurs within topic and its focus is then marked by a phrasal stress. The recent computer assisted acoustic analyses allow for studying even subtle phonetic differences of pitch or stress, so that the possibility to investigate the functional roles of these differences has become possible. Such investigations are of crucial importance for achieving an integrated description of language.