Corinna Langer (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Prosodic focus marking in Hungarian NPs – Experimental data on production and perception

This talk presents experimental data on the production and perception of prosodic focus marking in Hungarian complex noun phrases (NPs). Hungarian is a phrase accent language with the highest prosodic prominence on the leftmost element of a domain: word stress falls on the word-initial syllable (e.g. Varga 2002; Olaszy 2010); main accents are aligned with the left edge of an intonational phrase (e.g. Varga 2002). While syntax plays a major role in Hungarian focus marking, it may lead to ambiguities: when they syntactic focus position is filled, e.g., with a complex NP, focus can be on the whole NP (NP-focus) or only on parts of it (narrow Adj- or N-focus). We conducted a production study that investigated, if prosodic focus marking is used to disambiguate in this case and found significant differences in the prosodic patterns in the three focus conditions (Langer & Kügler 2022). I will also present preliminary data from some follow-up perception studies that test if the patterns found in the production study are used as robust cues in perception.