Department of Linguistics

A number of previous investigations using context matching (e.g., Gussenhoven 1983) and appropriateness rating tasks (Birch and Clifton 1995, Welby 2003) suggest that English-speaking listeners lack expectations regarding how the size of a focused constituent (broad versus narrow) can be expressed prosodically in certain constructions. In the present study English-speaking listeners were presented with the same SVO sentence (e.g., I bought a motorcycle) presented in either broad or narrow question contexts, and were asked to rate the prominence of the words in those sentences. In general, listeners reported sentence-final objects to be relatively more prominent than preceding verbs in the test sentences when those sentences were presented in narrow-object (What did you buy?) rather than broad-VP (What did you do?) or sentence (What happened?) focus contexts. This effect was found to be stronger in Experiment 2, where the answer was a correction. The findings suggest listeners do have expectations about the relationship between the size of a sentence’s focus constituent and its prosodic realization. It is argued that these expectations are well founded given the listeners’ likely experience with productions of this particular information structural contrast.