Broad, narrow and contrastive focus in Florentine Italian

Abstract

It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes in various languages. Previous data on Florentine Italian showed that broad focus and late narrow-contrastive focus utterances are marked by different pitch accents. With the present experiment we address the question whether a three way contrast exists in the intonational realization of broad, narrow-semantic and narrow-contrastive focus. Results show that while focus type (contrastive vs. noncontrastive) is signalled by different pitch accents, differences in focus scope (broad vs. narrow) are not.