Focus and the Interpretation of Pitch Accent: Disambiguating Embedded Questions

Abstract

It has been suggested that prosodic disambiguation of sentences is largely a matter of prosodic phrasing. Ambiguities can be resolved if a prosodic break aligns with a major syntactic boundary of one structure but not another. The placement of pitch accents is viewed as playing only a supporting role (cf. Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Huffnagel, & Fong, 1991). This view of prosodic disambiguation does not apply tho all structures of a language. We report five experiments studying ambiguous sentences like (i) and (ii):

(i) I asked the pretty little girl WHO is cold. I asked the pretty little girl who is COLD.

(ii) Joshua began to wonder WHEN his girlfriend got a tattoo. Joshua began to wonder when his girl friend got a TATTOO.

The presence of a prominent pitch accent on the interrogative constituent (who, when) biased listeners to a emmbedded question interpretation whereas its absence biased thhem to a relative clause(i) or temporal adjunct(ii) analysis. The results suggest that accent, like prosodic breaks, can play a central role in guiding sentence comprehension.

Keywords

focus pitch accents prosody sentence interpretation syntactic ambiguity

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