Kügler Frank, Féry Caroline
University of Potsdam, Germany.
Frankfurt University, Germany.
Lang Speech. 2017 Jun;60(2):260-288. doi: 10.1177/0023830916647204. Epub 2016 Jun 1.
This article is a follow-up study of Féry and Kügler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680-703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account.
本文是对费里和屈格勒（2008年。《德语中已知、新信息和焦点成分上的音高重音缩放》。《语音学杂志》，36卷，680 - 703页）的后续研究。它报告了一项关于德语句子焦点后区域潜在音高重音的F0高度的实验，并以此探讨了信息结构对句子语调影响的一个方面，这在前一篇文章中尚未涉及。实验结果表明，当几个成分位于这个位置时，它们常常处于降阶关系，但很少出现升阶。在37%的情况下，音高重音仅通过动态方式实现，不存在降阶或升阶。我们将这些结果解释为焦点后成分独立成组的证据。所检验的数据反驳了一种焦点后语调模型，即该模型认为焦点后成组被消除，所有重音都降至零。相反，音高重音常常存在，尽管有所减弱。此外，这些事实支持焦点后成分存在韵律分组；焦点后位置意味着一个极度压缩的音域，但不存在组的解体或所有音高重音的系统性完全去重音。我们建议采用一种德语语调模型，其中韵律分组由句法结构决定，且不能因信息结构而改变。信息结构在韵律中的作用仅限于句子不同部分音域关系的变化。在焦点前，由于信息已知，不存在或仅有很少的音域压缩。在焦点后，音域压缩是规则。一种语调模型必须考虑到这种不对称性。
