Broad, narrow and contrastive focus in Florentine Italian

It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes
in various languages. Previous data on Florentine Italian
showed that broad focus and late narrow-contrastive focus
utterances are marked by different pitch accents. With the
present experiment we address the question whether a
three way contrast exists in the intonational realization of
broad, narrow-semantic and narrow-contrastive focus.
Results show that while focus type (contrastive vs. noncontrastive)
is signalled by different pitch accents,
differences in focus scope (broad vs. narrow) are not.

Publication type: 
Contributo in volume
Author or Creator: 
Avesani C.
Vayra M.
Source: 
Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, edited by Solé M.J., Recasens D., Romero J., pp. 1803–1806, 2003
Date: 
2003
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/93299
urn:isbn:1-876346-49-3
Language: 
Eng