EFFECTS OF DIALECT AND CONTEXT IN THE REALISATION OF GERMAN PRENUCLEAR ACCENTS

Bettina Braun
Max-Planck-Instute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

ID 1683
[full paper]

We investigated whether alignment differences reported for Southern and Northern German speakers (Southerners align peaks in prenuclear accents later than Northerners) are carried over to the production of pragmatic contrast. Therefore, the realization of non-contrastive theme accents is compared with those in contrastive theme-rheme pairs such as 'Sam rented a truck and Johanna rented a car.' We found that when producing this 'double-contrast', speakers mark contrast both phonetically by delaying and rising the peak of the theme accent ('Johanna') and/or phonologically by a change in rheme accent type. The effect of dialect is complex: Only in non-contrastive contexts produced with a high rheme accent Southerners align peaks later than Northerners. Further, peak delay as a means to signal contrast is not used uniformly by the two varieties. Dialect clearly affects the realization of prenuclear accents but its effect is conditioned by pragmatic and intonational context.