Further Experiments in the "Search for Tonics"

Abstract

The experiments reported in the present paper were set up in order to restrict some of the syntactic and semantic criteria involved in the task of tonic identification. Experiment 2 examines tonic identification in a particular type of contrastive sentence and in cleft sentences. Experiments 3-5 examine the effect of the discourse on tonic identification. The results indicate that when the information focus is a contrasted element that contradicts a previous element, the information focus is identified consistently as tonic. When the information focus is a "new" element realized as the leftmost lexical item in a sentence, it is normally identified as the tonic, but if judges are asked to identify tonics in utterances that do not have a clear "given/new" structure, then several tonics are identified. The results indicate, therefore, that the tone group in its unmarked form will contain several peaks of prominence.