Contrastive topic constituents in German

This article reports on a study investigating the intonational realization of context-changing and context-preserving contrastive topics in German. Results of the pilot study show that both kinds of topics can be marked by different pitch accents on the topic constituent, although speakerspecific differences emerge. When speakers do use different pitch accents, low rises (L*H) exclusively occur on contextchanging contrastive topics whereas simple rises ((L)H*) are frequently used for both types. The qualitative results are complemented by a fine-grained phonetic analysis using Functional Data Analysis. Together, the results provide empirical evidence from a carefully controlled study for the impressionistic descriptions found in the literature.