Generation of Accent in Nominally Premodified Noun Phrases

GENERATION OF ACCENT IN NOMINALLY PREMODIFIED NOUN PHRASES RON ZACHARSK1 Departtnent of Linguistics University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK abstract~ Tile primary purpose of this paper is to present a set of conditions that constrain accent placement in focused nominally ptemodified NPs. Selkirk (1984) argues that if the premodifier is an argument of the head, then the head can be deaccented. I agree with Selkirk's proposal and argue that what is essential is not whether the premodifier is a grammatical argument of the head noun, but rather, whether it is a 0-complement in lexical conceptual structure. This proposal is evaluated by testing it against a corpus of naturally oc- curring data. O. introduction It is generally agreed that an utterance can be di- vided into two parts which are related to the dis- course function of the information represented by that utterance. The TOPIC is what the sentence is about and the FOCUS represents a new predication about the topic. This information structure constrains accent placement. For example, 'primary' accent must be within the constituent that represents the focused information. The ability of an accent on a single word to mark a larger phrase as focus is widely recognized. For example in (1) the accent on conservative can mark the phrase redneck conservative as the focused con- stituent (since (1) can be used to answer the ques- tion What was your town like? ). (Accent is indi- cated by small caps and focus by underlining.) 11 would especially like to thank Jeanette Gundel and Nancy Hedberg for discussions and comments. (1) My hometown was redneck CObISER- Y_ATI~. (Lia Matera 1988 Smart Money) in (1) focus is represented by a single constituent, but this need not be the case as (2) illustrates. (2) A: Where's Karl? B: ~ her ~ . In (2B), Karl, the referent of her, is the topic and tire focus is thus discontinuous. Though there seems to be agreement about the importance of a theory that accounts for the ac- cent-focus relation, there is little agreement about the exact nature of this relationship. For instance, different theories give different answers to the question of whether this relationship is syntactic, semantic, morphological, or pragmatic. There is also disagreement over how large a phrase can be brought into focus by a single accent. Even for simple constructions the relation- ship between accent and focus is unclear. In exam~ pies (3)-(7), a MODIFIER + NOUN constituent is focused. Note that in the (a) member of each pair, it is the modifer that receives the accent and in the (b) member of the pair, it is the head noun. (3) a. Those are CRAWLING things. b. Those are crawling INSECTS. (Bolinger 1986.120) (4) a. He has HUNTINGTON's disease. b, He has Huntington's CHOREA. (Bolinger 1986.118) (5) a. 1~ do university RESEARCH. b. I do CETACEAN research. (6) a. (How do you know Fran72 What was he to you?) He was my HISTORY teacher. AuIa/s DE COLING-92, NANTES, 23-28 AO1Yr 1992 2 5 …

Content truncated to 500 words