The prosody of focus: a case-study with cross-linguistic implications

Abstract

It is well-known that focus may have a prosodic reflection in various languages, affecting prosodic phrasing, prominence and/or intonation. However, the issue whether there is any relationship among the different kinds of prosodic marking remains unclear. This paper presents a detailed examination of the prosody of focus in European Portuguese. It is shown that there are no phrasing effects of focus; by contrast, phrasal stress and tonal events play a crucial role in the expression of focus. Implications of these findings for a cross-linguistic understanding of focus prosody are explored, namely it is argued that the prosodic reflexes are not universal, or arbitrary.