Prosody and Information Structure of German Sentences Containing the Stressed Focus Particle "auch"

Stefan Sudhoff

In my talk, I want to present the results of an experimental study examining the prosodic and information structural properties of constituents associated with the stressed variant of the focus particle "auch" (‘also’) in German. In Krifka’s (1999) account, these constituents are analysed as I-topics which can, but need not be prosodically marked as such by means of the typical contrastive accent.

Our hypothesis was that this optionality in the prosodic realisation should, however, disappear in potentially ambiguous cases, where stressed "auch" (which obligatorily follows its associated constituent) can associate with more than one constituent to its left, located in the so-called prefield or middlefield of the German clause, cf. (1):

(1) [Am Dienstag] ist [Ingo] wahrscheinlich AUCH in der Bibliothek gewesen.

On Tuesday aux I. probably also in the library been

We combined a production experiment, in which the subjects had to produce sentences of this kind in contexts triggering one of the possible readings, with a perception experiment, in which different subjects were auditorily presented the produced data without context and had to disambiguate them in a sentence completion task. The findings of an acoustic analysis of the production material will be compared with the outcome of the perception experiment. Finally I will indicate some possible consequences of the results for the grammatical description of the focus particle "auch" in German.