Contrast and Accent in Dutch and Romanian: a Comparative Study

1. Contrast and accent in Dutch and RomanianMarc SwertsCommunication & CognitionTilburg University

2. Overview • Contrast and accent • Experimental paradigm • Results for Dutch and Romanian • Discussion and conclusion

3. Contrast and accent • Contrast refers to cases where one or more individual items are singled out from a larger (but limited) set of alternatives (Bolinger 1986; Cruttenden 1986; Chafe 1974, 1976) • Contrast can be signalled by pitch accents, especially when they occur in a ‘non-default’ position (narrow focus accents) • Example (from Chafe 1974): “RONALD made the hamburgers.”

4. Contrast is controversial • Debate about definition of contrastive accents: • Contrastive accents and corrections • Contrastive accents and newness accents (limited set of alternatives) • Debate about prosodic properties of contrastive accents: • Do contrastive accents have a separate shape? • Are contrastive accents more prominent than newness accents? • Some of the opposing views can be reconciled (Krahmer and Swerts 2001)

5. Today: other factors • Forward and backward-looking contrastive relations • Distance between contrasting elements • Syntactic factors (inside NP) • Language differences

6. Problem 1: forward versus backward • A contrast relation can hold with a preceding or with following item • Example: “First he wanted the BLUE ball, and then he wanted to RED ball” • Hypothesis: backward-looking relations have a stronger impact on accent distribution than forward-looking relations (compare: anaphoric versus cataphoric)

7. Problem 2: effect of distance • Contasting items can be close to each other or not • Example: 1. The red ball touches the BLUE ball 2. The triangle touches the red ball. Then it touches the BLUE ball. • Hypothesis: Contrastive relations between items that are close to each other have a stronger impact on accent distribution than distant ones.

8. Problem 3: lexico-syntactic factors • Contrasts can occur on syntactically different lexical items (e.g. adjective versus noun) • Examples: • He saw the RED ball • He saw the red BALL • Hypothesis: Contrasts on adjective have a stronger impact on accent distribution than contrasts on noun (nuclear accents can be preceded but not followed by other accents)

9. Problem 4: language differences • Languages can differ in the extent to which they use accent distribution to signal contrast relations • Example: • Dutch: “ZWARTE driehoek” (normal) • Italian: “TRIANGOLO nero” (marked) • Hypothesis: Impact of contrast on accent distribution is stronger in Germanic languages than in Romance languages

10. Current study • Analysis of relation between accents and contrast in Dutch and Romanian • Three questions: • Forward- versus backwardlooking relations • Relations within and across sentence boundaries (distance) • Syntactic function of a word • Use of experimental paradigm to elicit accent patterns: speakers are asked to describe different scenes of moving geometrical figures which they watch on a computer screen

24. Data • Paradigm used to elicit utterances from 10 Dutch and 10 Romanian speakers: • utterances with SVO order in both languages • NPs were adj-noun in Dutch, noun-adj in Romanian • Speakers had to describe 36 scenes with 3 consecutive utterances; third sentence contained a target NP • Dutch: “blauw vierkant”; “gele driehoek” • Romanian: “patratul albastru”; “triunghiul galben” • All utterances labeled in terms of accent distribution by 2 independent annotators (few disagreements solved by consensus)

25. DUTCH RESULTS

26. Syntactic function: noun or adjective Within sentence Contrast on adjective Contrast on noun

27. Syntactic function: noun or adjective (2) Across sentence boundaries Contrast on adjective Contrast on noun

28. Forward- backward Forward (subject) Contrast on adjective Contrast on noun

29. Forward- backward (2) Backward (object) Contrast on adjective Contrast on noun

30. Within/across sentence Contrast on adj within sentence Contrast on adj across sentence Contrast on noun across sentence Contrast on noun within sentence

31. ROMANIAN RESULTS

32. No effect of contrast at all • Irrespective of discourse context: very consistent preference to put a single accent on adjective (second word in Romanian NP). • This effect is especially true when the NP occurs in object position; also, impressionistically the accent in utterance-final position often appears to be more prominent • Relatively many cases of completely deaccented NPs (both adjective and noun) when NP occurs in subject position (rarely happened in Dutch) • Example: “Triunghiul albastru atinge patratul albastru”

33. Conclusion: Dutch • Accent distribution is highly dependent on contrast relations between items • But in a complex way: • Backward-looking relations are stronger than forward-looking ones • Contrasts within sentences are stronger than across sentence boundaries • Contrasts on adjectives have stronger impact than contrasts on nouns

34. Conclusion: Romanian • Accent distribution is not dependent at all on contrast relations • It seems to serve a demarcative function, i.e. to signal the right edge of a phrase • This is especially true when the NP appears in utterance-final position.