Fronted NPs in a verb-initial language – clause-internal or external? Prosodic cues to the rescue!

This paper investigates prosodic features of fronted constituents in the verb-initial Oceanic language Gela (spoken by about 16.000 people in Solomon Islands). Although Gela’s basic constituent order is verb-(object-)subject/predicate-subject, constituents can appear in front of the verbal predicate. Fronted constituents in Gela can be interpreted as pre-clausal (i.e. external to the following clause, immediately preceding it) or clause-initial (i.e. clause-internal, at the very beginning of the clause), each of which can be associated with certain information structure categories of topics and focus. This paper discusses how prosody provides clues towards the interpretation of fronted constituents as pre-clausal or clause-initial, based on a quantitative study of their prosodic correlates. We argue for using prosodic criteria established on clear examples to help analyse ambiguous cases. The results are compatible with an approach that recognises the importance of prosody in syntactic analysis and contribute data from a little known language to the discussion to what degree prosodic and syntactic phrasing are aligned

Focus prosody in Fijian: In-situ focus marking

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of focus prosody in Fijian - a verb-first language. We analysed the pitch (f0), intensity, and duration data of the same sentence that vary in the position of narrow focus: (i) initial, (ii) medial, and (iii) final focus, compared to the neutral focus. Compared with neutral focus, we found that narrow focus led to a general elevation of the pitch f0, greater intensity, and longer mean syllable duration. The only exception is for initial focus. Initial focus differs from the other two positions, with shorter mean syllable duration and no significant difference in intensity with neutral focus. We used sentences composed solely of juxtaposed NPs to elicit focus because in a verb-first language, focus is otherwise often marked by word order

Prosodic encoding of declarative, interrogative and imperative sentences in Jaminjung, a language of Australia

This paper examines the prosodic encoding of sentence types in Jaminjung, a language of Northern Australia. Analyses cover the description of the contours as well as a systematic acoustic analysis, comprising the measurements of F0, duration, pitch excursion and velocity for each syllable in datasets carefully selected from spontaneous speech. Results show that declaratives and imperatives receive a falling contour; interrogatives, either polar or wh questions, can have one of three contours: falling, fall-rise, marked by a rise on the last syllable, or rising. A test on the F0 measurements of each sentence type with a falling contour reveals that they are in effect distinguished by pitch register, ranging from higher to lower, from imperatives to polar questions, to wh questions and statements. Hence, contour shape alone is not sufficient to describe the encoding of sentence types in Jaminjung: overall pitch register is also used. We will argue for the usefulness of instrumental phonetic investigations in describing lesser-known languages and to enhance our understanding of sentence type characterization in a typological perspective

On being First

In a typological perspective, first positions in sentences have been associated with information flow (Firbas 1964). Corpus research in the world languages has yielded two major, and seemingly opposing, ordering patterns: 1) a ‘given-before-new’ ordering (Gundel 1988), in which predictable information from previous discourse is placed in first position, ensuring high accessibility for speaker and listener to previously mentioned elements, and less accessible information is found towards the end of the sentence, cued by prosodic accents or morphosyntactic markers, etc.; 2) a ‘more-newsworthy-first’ ordering (Mithun 1987), where more important information for the developing discourse is placed in first position (i.e. new topics,‘fronting’ of focalized elements, etc.); this importance is usually to signal that the information in question should be brought to the forefront of the hearer’s attention. This paper will contribute to this discussion by reconsidering the very notion of ‘first position’ in two Australian languages, arguing, with others (Baker and Mushin 2008), that it is not always clear what it corresponds to, mostly depending whether prosodic criteria are taken into accoun