Sentence Accent

Sentence Accent

1. Nuclear Accent

   • Phonologically, the syllable starting the last pitch movement in an intonation group, and functionally, as the syllable that marks the beginning of the most meaningful protion of utterance

2. Nuclearity

   • Defined according to formal and functional criteria
     • Phonetic
       • Concentrate on the type of prominence displayed by the nuclear syllable
     • Distributional
       • Refer to position in the intonation group, usually "last prominence syllable"
     • Functional
       • Say what the nucleus does

3. Nucleus Placement Theories

   • Traditional Model (Halliday)
     • Bases its argumentation on a classification of words according to the semantic burden they carry and consequent capacity of accentability
       • Also incorporates the traditional rule of nucleus placement on the "last lexical item"
   • The Syntactic Model (Chomsky and Halle)
     • Three main points
       • Accent placement is determined exclusively by syntactic structure and predicted by rule
       • Each utterance has a normal or neutral accent placement
       • Any other options for nucleus placement are considered special
   • The Semantic Model (Bolinger)
     • Speakers assign accents by some kind of mental mechanism which directly reflects their intent, totally ignoring syntactic factors
       • Words will get an accent according to their semantic weight expressed in terms of unexpectedness, thus, highly predictable words are unlikely to be accented
   • The Focal Model
     • Broad and narrow focus
       • Refers to the fact that the information conveyed by the intonation group is completely new and therefore "in focus"
     • Advantage of the Focal Approach
       • Takes contextual and pragmatic aspects into account, without necessarily disregarding syntactic considerations
     • Accent signal focus, not all constituents need to take an accent and unfocused constituents do not take an accent
     • Newness and Givenness
       • Halliday: given information is optional and not marked by pitch, new information is the part of the information unit which the speaker has decided to present as not being available to the hearer
     • Nucleus placement and givenness
       • Is brought into focus and then reaccented, Identical material can be reused, focalised and accented as a process of recapitulation on the part of the adressee, to make it clear to the speaker that agrees with him or that heunderstood the message