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Second Occurrence Focus And The Acoustics Of Prominence, Jonathan Howell

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth‐conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb‐noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) …