Testing the Reality of Focus Domains

Abstract

An experiment was carried out which was aimed at testing the hypothesis that, in English, prominence on a predicate contains no information about the "given-new" status of that predicate if it is followed by a (lexical) object that carries a sentence accent. The results are taken to lend support to a view of English prosody whereby (a) prosodic structure is not (fully) predictable from syntactic structure, and (b) the relation between "new"-ness and a sentence accent is indirect.