Phonetic Correlates of Second Occurrence Focus

In this talk, we investigate the question of whether and how 'second occurrence focus' (SOF) is realized phonetically in German. We point out that preceding studies overlooked various phonetic effects that are independently motivated in the SOF sentences, hence failing to have a complete explanation of the SOF phenomenon. We present convincing evidence for the phonetic marking of SOF, and propose a more accurate and complete account for the SOF phenomenon. The apparent lack of phonetic marking on SOF in sentences like (1b) has raised much discussion on the semantic theory of focus (Partee, 1991; Rooth, 1992), and has become one of the decisive factors for choosing between the 'strong' and the 'weak' theory of focus. Some researchers have reported the existence of phonetic marking of SOF (Rooth, 1996; Beaver et al., 2004), claiming that SOF is not marked by pitch, but by duration instead, although it is very subtle at best (SOF is on the average 6ms longer than Non-Focus, according to Beaver et al. (2004)). All the studies on SOF, however, overlook certain aspects of the examples they have been investigating. In their examples, SOF always appears at a postnuclear position, i.e., where no pitch accent can appear for an independent reason. That is, the lack of pitch accent on SOF is not due to the lack of F-marking, but due to the phonological condition where SOF appears. In our experimental study with German sentences, we examined sentences with prenuclear SOF (2b), and those with postnuclear SOF (2c), comparing with their Non-Focus counterparts in (3). We also compared SOF and Non-Focus with first occurrence focus (FOF) in two different locations: sentence-initial (prenuclear) FOF (4) and sentence-medial (nuclear) FOF (2a). We examined F0 height and duration, the results of which are shown in Fig. 1 and 2, respectively. As for pitch, we found that prenuclearly (Fig. 1, dark bars), a hierarchy in terms of focus types (FOF > SOF > Non-Focus) is observed. That is, FOF is higher than SOF, which itself is higher than Non-Focus. Postnuclearly (Fig. 1, light bars), on the other hand, SOF shows no significant difference from Non-Focus. This means that SOF is in fact phonetically marked by a pitch accent, but only when it is in a position where it can receive one. As for duration, both pre-and postnuclear SOF, as well as FOF, exhibit significant difference from Non-Focus, as in Fig. 2. No …