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This paper studies the prosodic realization of dual-focus in German, that is, two foci in a single sentence, with special consideration of the interaction between focus assignment and phrasing. In a production experiment, dual-focus was compared with its initial, final, and all-new counterparts in sentences with subject NPs and VPs of different lengths. The results showed that there were three different patterns of dual-focus realization: (1) The most frequent one was the two-peak pattern (57.8%), that is, a falling tone on both focused words and compressed and lowered pitch in-between; (2) the second most frequent was the two-phrase realization (23.5%), in which both foci were also realized as a falling tone, but in this case, a high boundary tone was inserted after the subject NP; (3) the least frequent pattern was the hat-pattern (18.7%), consisting of a rising tone on the first focus and a falling tone on the second one while the pitch in-between is kept as a high plateau. This was applied mostly in utterances containing a short subject NP. We interpret these results in terms of optional prosodic phrasing. A sentence with two foci can be realized in one or two intonation phrases, but in both cases, the focus is assigned within the prosodic domain derived from syntax. These results show that Culminativity, the principle requiring a one-to-one correspondence between prosodic domains and their heads, is violable in German. Two equally prominent pitch accents are allowed to co-exist in one intonation phrase. Finally, the metrical structure of dual-focus speaks for a recursive structure of German prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the impact of dialogue strategies and functional features of spatial arrangements on communicative success. To examine the sharing of cognition between two minds in order to achieve a joint goal, we collected a corpus of 24 extended German-language dialogues in a referential communication task that involved furnishing a dolls' house. Results show how successful communication, as evidenced by correct placement of furniture items, is affected by: (a) functionality of the furniture arrangement; (b) previous task experience; and (c) dialogue features such as description length and orientation information. To enhance research in this area, our 'Dolldialogue' corpus (www.dolldialogue.space) is now available as a free resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]