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The prosody of non-assertive speech acts other than questions is rather underexplored. Very little is known about the role of information structure in non-assertive speech acts in general. The present study presents two production experiments examining the prosody of string-identical verb-second (experiment 1) and verb-final (experiment 2) wh -exclamatives and wh -questions in German in relation to their status as different speech acts, in relation to their sensitivity to information structure, and in relation to speaker sex. The study shows that the two speech acts are differentiated by many prosodic means, both globally (duration, intonation contour) and locally (accent distribution in the clause-initial and clause-final regions; pitch, duration, intensity on various elements in the clause, especially the subject pronoun and the direct object, which are more prominent in exclamatives, and the verb-second auxiliary, which is more prominent in questions). Exclamatives overall show a very rigid prosodic contour; they typically are realized with an accent on the subject pronoun and on the object and end in a fall. Questions are much more flexible; they are realized as rises or falls, and show a more varied accent structure in the clause-initial and clause-final regions. Both speech acts show information-structural effects of givenness marking, but the effects in exclamatives are remarkably weak. It is proposed that the speech-act marking prosody overrides information-structural effects to some extent. Male and female speakers show differences in their preferred accent patterns for the two speech acts. Some acoustic differences are only reliable for female speakers.

It is well-established for assertions that the information-structural status of referents influences prosodic prominence: givenness reduces and contrastive focus increases prominence, relative to newness. We present production data in German on the prosodic marking of givenness and contrast in comparison to newness in two non-assertive speech acts: polar exclamatives and polar questions. The results show that contrastive focus is consistently marked in both speech acts: through an increase of prosodic prominence on the contrastive element itself, and through a decrease of prominence of a word in the prenuclear region that in sentences without contrast typically is prominent. Givenness is not clearly marked prosodically in either speech act. We argue that givenness is necessary, but not sufficient for deaccentuation. First, if deaccentuation requires an accent shift (so that the intonation phrase is headed), the semantic-pragmatic effects of the shifted accent must fit the discourse context. We argue that there are subtle discourse conditions on accent shift in the questions involving verum focus, preventing a shift. Second, deaccentuation is disfavored if speech act marking requires accentuation, as in exclamatives. Overall, the different functions of prosody show subtle interactions, hinting at a subordinate functional load of givenness marking but not of contrast marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of German sentences with a leftdislocated subject vs. object: (i) a rising accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a rising-falling hat contour on the main clause; (ii) a falling accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a falling accent plus subsequent deaccentuation. The contours had differential effects depending on the grammatical function of the dislocated phrase (subject/object) and, for the recall, on the cue type for the recall (subject/object), in certain conditions overriding the subject-before-object preference normally found in processing. To account for the findings, we propose: (1) Contour (i) signals the topic status of the referent of the dislocated phrase. Contour (ii) signals that referent's focus status. (2) Topics are referents that serve as an address in a structured discourse representation in working memory under which information about that referent is stored. (3) Subjects are default topics, whereas objects are not, so that topic-marking an object is motivated, which results in an object-before-subject preference for sentences with topical objects during processing. (4) Retrieval of information from an address incurs a lower processing load if the appropriate address is cued than if some other referent is cued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]