Mády Katalin

Prosodic cues of focus marking in Hungarian: do they exist?
 

Prosodic focus marking is usually characterised by longer duration of the stressed syllable, higher pitch maxima, a greater pitch range, and a delay in the nuclear accent peak. These cues appear both in languages that express focus mainly by prosody (Germanic languages) and in those with syntactic focus marking, i.e. by moving the prominent lexical unit into the final sentence position (Romance languages, Czech, Slovak).
 

The relevance of the above cues for Hungarian was investigated in a speech production experiment in which broad, narrow, and contrastive foci were compared. Accented syllables showed a rather homogeneous tonal pattern with an H+L* accent, and they did not differ with regard to the prosodic parameters listed above. The perceptual relevance of prosodic differences was tested in a perception experiment based on naturalness scores. Although there was a tendency for matching question and answer pairs to be judged as more natural than mismatching ones, the latter still received scores around the mean of the scale. Thus it seems that prosodic focus marking is optional in Hungarian and is not crucial for expressing information structure.