773536

research-article2018
LAS0010.1177/0023830918773536Language and SpeechHamlaoui et al.

Language
and Speech
Original Article

Language and Speech

Acoustic Correlates of Focus

1­–20
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0023830918773536
https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830918773536
journals.sagepub.com/home/las

Fatima Hamlaoui
University of Toronto, Canada

Marzena Żygis
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

Jonas Engelmann
Universität der Künste Berlin, Germany

Michael Wagner
McGill University, Canada

Abstract
Languages vary in the type of contexts that affect prosodic prominence. This paper reports
on a production study investigating how different types of foci influence prosody in Polish and
Czech noun phrases. The results show that in both languages, focus and givenness are marked
prosodically, with pitch and intensity as the main acoustic correlates. Like Germanic languages,
Polish and Czech patterns show prosodic focus marking in a broad range of contexts and differ in
this regard from other fixed-word-stress languages such as French. This suggests that (a) Polish
and Czech are similar to Germanic languages and are unlike Romance languages in marking a
variety of types of focus prosodically; (b) there is no close correlation between fixed word stress
and lack of prosodic focus marking because Polish, which has fixed stress on the penult, shows
prosodic focus marking for all types of focus; and (c) there is no straightforward relationship
between flexible word order and whether focus and givenness are prosodically marked, contrary
to earlier claims, because both Czech and Polish, with their relatively flexible word order, are
more similar to English than Romance languages.

Keywords
West Slavic, focus, givenness, prominence shift, fixed word stress

Corresponding author:
Fatima Hamlaoui, University of Toronto, French, 50 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1J4, Canada.
Email: f.hamlaoui@utoronto.ca
2 Language and Speech 00(0)

1  Introduction
1.1 Focus, givenness and prominence
Prosodic marking of information status is a well-established phenomenon and has been docu-
mented best in Germanic languages such as English, Dutch or German, where the information-
structural category of (the narrow) focus has often been shown to correlate with an increase in
prominence, while discourse-given material is prosodically reduced (Ladd, 1980; Nooteboom &
Terken, 1982; Terken, 1984; Eady, Cooper, Klouda, Müller & Lotts, 1986; Terken & Nooteboom,
1987; Terken & Hirschberg, 1994; Ladd, 2008; Breen, Fedorenko, Wagner & Gibson, 2010). In
cases where the focused constituent is not the one that would otherwise have received main promi-
nence (i.e., default prominence as part of a broad-focus sentence), this can result in a shift in promi-
nence. Phonetically, such prominence shifts are reflected in a reduced pitch range on the given
material after the focused constituent, with comparatively monotone low pitch in falling contours,
such as English declaratives with a falling intonation, or comparatively monotone high pitch in
rising contours, such as in English yes/no questions (Pierrehumbert, 1980). In sentences pro-
nounced with a falling contour in English, focused words are pronounced with higher pitch, high
intensity, and a longer duration compared to a control case with broad focus, while discourse-given
information is reduced for all these acoustic measures (Breen et al., 2010).
The effect of focus on prosodic prominence is briefly illustrated in (1). In Clara’s first response
(1a), she is addressing the wh-question asked by Ann; the part that corresponds to the information
being asked is a blue shirt. We say that this constituent is in focus. In Clara’s second response (1b),
she not only addresses the question asked by Ann, but also contrasts her answer with the previous
one, and shifts prominence to the adjective.
English (Vallduví & Zacharski, 1994, p.13)

(1) a. Ann: What did you get Ben for Christmas?

  Clara: ~[I got him [F a blue SHIRT]].
  b. Ann: What did you get Diane?
  Clara: ~[I got her [F ~[a [FRED] shirt]]].

We say that red is focused here and shirt is given, which is due to the presence of an antecedent
blue shirt in the discourse context. This is encoded prosodically by a shift in prominence. The word
red is realized with an accent whereas the word shirt is deaccented in (1b), in contrast to (1a) where
the noun is accented.
In this paper we are primarily concerned with such shifts in prominence, where a non-final word
is focused and following given material is reduced in pitch range. Focus is often said to cause deac-
centuation of the following, given material. However, recent evidence suggests that at least in
Germanic languages, focus lowers pitch range, rather than obliterating pitch targets (Féry &
Kügler, 2008; Féry & Ishihara, 2009; Kügler & Féry, 2017; Wagner & McAuliffe, 2017). As Ladd
(2008) explains, prominence is a relative notion and the precise phonetic manifestation of shifts in
prominence vary depending on the intonational tunes and other factors. The acoustic correlates we
use to test for such shifts in prominence are measures of relative prominence between the focused
and the given word. For example, if prominence is shifted from the noun to the adjective in English,
the adjective will have higher pitch, intensity and duration relative to the noun compared to a rendi-
tion in which prominence is not shifted. Note that it is not possible to simply quantitatively meas-
ure the absolute prominence of two words and decide which is more prominent. Due to patterns of
pitch and intensity declination across an utterance, among other factors, it is often a word later in
Hamlaoui et al. 3

an utterance with lower pitch and lower intensity that is perceived as more prominent. This is why
we will mostly look at differences in prominence relative to a control condition with broad focus to
assess whether focus has any prosodic effects.
Such effects of focus and givenness can be modelled using the Alternative Theory of Focus
(Rooth, 1985, 1992). Going back to example (1), the context question in (1a) denotes a set of alter-
natives of the form I got him x. This means that in the response, which as a congruent answer to the
question itself is of the form I got him x, the constituent a blue shirt can be prosodically marked as
focused, and the material I got him can be prosodically marked as given. In the Alternative Theory
of Focus (Rooth, 1985, 1992), the relation to an antecedent is expressed using the operator ~,
which requires a discourse salient antecedent that is identical to the constituent it attaches to except
for material that is substituted with an “alternative,” that is, a contrasting constituent of the same
semantic type (for example, type ⟨e⟩ for a referring expression and ⟨e,t⟩ for a one-place predicate).
The constituents that are replaced by alternatives are marked by syntactic F-markers (the material
that is “marked as focused”), the material already present in the antecedent can be called “marked
as given.”1 The prominence effects of focus are accounted for based on the assumption that within
the scope of ~, F-marked material has to be more prominent than non-F-marked material (cf.
Rooth, 1992; Truckenbrodt, 1995).
In (1b) we can see that what is crucial is what kind of antecedents are salient in the context, not
just which question is being asked: in addition to the antecedent relation to the question, there is
also an antecedent established between a blue shirt of the previous answer and a red shirt in the
current answer. Although Rooth (1992) and others (e.g., Schwarzschild 1999; Wagner 2006) posit
a single operator that accounts for both focus and givenness effects, others have suggested that
these two phenomena require two separate mechanisms (e.g., Reinhart, 2006; Katz & Selkirk,
2011; see Wagner, 2006, 2012; Büring, 2016 for extensive discussion of this issue).
Languages belonging to different families and consisting of different prosodic systems such as
Japanese (Swerts, Taniguchi, & Katagari, 2000), Korean (Lee & Xu, 2010), Cantonese (Gu & Li,
2007), Taiwanese (Southern Min), Taiwan Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin (Chen, Wang, & Xu, 2009)
and Bengali (Hayes & Lahiri, 1991) have been reported to show comparable marking of informa-
tion status, where both focus and givenness have a significant effect on measures of F0 (other
prosodic parameters have not always been considered).
However, it is clear that languages vary in whether they prosodically mark focus and in the
circumstances in which they do. Romance languages, for example, have been reported to some-
times resist deaccentuation of given items and to only mark certain types of focus (among oth-
ers Portuguese, Crystal, 1975, p. 44, cited in Cruttenden, 1993; Romanian, Ladd, 1990; Spanish,
Cruttenden, 1993).
Vallduví and Zacharski (1994) argue this is also the case in Italian (2) and Catalan (3), where the
given status of the adjective in (2b) and (3b) does not lead to its deaccentuation (see also Ladd,
1990, 1996 on the possibility of deaccenting on the sentence level but not within noun phrases
(NPs) in Italian.)2 Capital letters here indicate prosodic prominence.
Italian
(2) a. Anna: Cosa hai regalato a Benjamin per Natale?
  Clara: Gli ho regalato [F una camicia NERA].
  iobj 1s-past-give a shirt black.
  ‘I got him a black shirt.’
  b. Anna: E cosa hai regalato a Diana?
  Clara: Le ho regalato [F dei pantaloni NERI.].
  ‘I got her black pants.’
4 Language and Speech 00(0)

Catalan
(3) a. Anna: Què li vas regalar, al Benjamí, per Nadal?
  Clara: Li vaig regalar [F una camisa NEGRA].
  iobj 1s-past-give a shirt black.
  ‘I got him a black shirt.’
  b. Anna: I a la Diana, què li vas regalar?
  Clara: Li vaig regalar [F uns pantalons NEGRES].
  ‘I got her black pants.’

This pattern was confirmed experimentally by Swerts, Krahmer and Avesani (2002), who
observe that Italian speakers accent both focused and given information in NPs. However, they
assign larger accents to focused words, which suggests the difference between focus and givenness
marking is gradient rather than categoric. Using an experimental design similar to Swerts et al.,
Hamlaoui, Coridun and Féry (2012) report a similar pattern in (Standard European) French, where
focused items are boosted but given ones fail to reduce.
To account for the difference between Romance and Germanic languages, Vallduví (1991) pro-
poses that languages vary according to a "plasticity" parameter. Some, such as the above-men-
tioned Germanic languages, are [+ plastic] in that they can mold intonation contours to associate
focus with prominence. Others, like the above-mentioned Romance languages, are [- plastic] in
that prosodic prominence is fixed to a certain position and the association between focus and pro-
sodic prominence is achieved through manipulations of the word order whenever the language
allows them. The source of this difference in plasticity, however, remains unclear.
According to Ladd (1990, 2008) the picture is somewhat more complex, in that languages actu-
ally differ in the types of foci they prosodically encode. Whenever the potential antecedent for
focus marking is located within the same sentence, a type of focus that we subsequently refer to as
"parallel focus," following vander Klok, Wagner, and Goad (in press), speakers of languages of
Italian, for example, do not shift prominence to the constituent that would have been the potential
focus (Ladd 2008). Cruttenden (1993, 2006) tested a variety of examples, including those that
according to our characterization would be called cases of parallelism, and finds that in these types
of examples speakers of French, Italian, Spanish and Tunisian Arabic fail both to deaccent given
items and shift prominence to the contrasting one. However, Cruttenden’s study is limited in scope
and does not allow statistical generalizations.
The fact that Romance languages differ from English in their propensity to mark focus prosodi-
cally is often related to their greater flexibility in word order, the idea being that in a language with
more fixed word order, prosody takes over the role of marking focus that would otherwise have
been encoded by word order (e.g., Lambrecht, 1994). There are only a few studies, however, that
directly aim to test differences between languages (Swerts et al., 2002, is an exception), and if they
do, they often do not check for a correlation with the possibility of changing word order.
Vander Klok et al. (in press) designed an experiment that directly compared French and English,
looking at different types of focus, and controlling for word order by looking both at clefted and
non-clefted constituents. With respect to different types of focus, they examine focus and given-
ness marking in four contexts, illustrated in (4) to (7).3 Italics mark the antecedent and bold fonts
the location of prosodic prominence (phrasal/sentential stress).
All-new (control condition)
(4) A: Jordan is always purchasing cycling stuff.
  B: Yeah, yesterday he bought a red bike.
Hamlaoui et al. 5

Corrective focus4
(5) A: Yesterday, Jordan bought a blue bike.
  B: No, yesterday he bought a red bike.
Contrastive focus
(6) A: Yesterday Jordan bought a blue bike.
  B: Really? Yesterday my friend bought a red bike.
Parallel focus

(7) A: I heard that Jordan is into cycling.

  B: Yeah, the other day he bought a blue bike and a red bike.

By comparing how focus is marked within NPs, it is possible to check for prosodic differences
in cases in which word order is relatively fixed both in French and English.
In a nutshell, vander Klok et al.’s results show that French expresses focus only in a subset of
the contexts in which English does. Essentially, French only reliably marks focus prosodically in
cases of corrective focus and systematically fails to show prominence shifts in case of parallelism
where the antecedent to the potential focus marking is within the same sentence (cf. Ladd, 2008).
Note, however, that Rooth’s Alternative Theory of Focus does not distinguish between different
types of focus such as “corrective” versus “non-corrective” focus. All contexts in (4–7) provide
antecedents for focus marking, and therefore should lead to similar prosodic patterns in the responses.
Vander Klok et al. argue that the apparent sensitivity to focus type when comparing French to
English can be explained by a difference in the syntactic scope options of ~: in French, Italian and
Catalan, ~ has to attach higher than in English. Whereas in English, ~ can be attached to sub-clausal
constituents, in French, they argue, it has to attach to the root node. Under this theory, the represen-
tational difference between the English cases in (1b) and the Italian and Catalan examples in (2b)
and (3b) is that there is no embedded ~ that would force the deaccentuation of the adjective. Their
account can explain why French does not display prominence shift under parallelism, and more
generally, it can explain the differences between dialogues reported in Cruttenden (1993, 2006).5
Related evidence for Spanish is presented in Klassen, Wagner, Tremblay, and Goad (2016).
Another possibility, however, is that in Romance languages only certain semantic types of focus
are marked. For example Ladd (2008) suggests that only corrections lead to prominence shifts in
some Romance languages. It is not trivial, however, to define what “corrective” means semanti-
cally without a substantial enrichment of focus theory.
For our purposes, what is important is that languages differ in the types focus that are marked
prosodically, and we are interested in whether these differences correlate with other aspects of the
grammar of a language.

1.2 Expressing information structure in Czech and Polish

In the present paper, we examine the prosodic realization of focus and givenness in yet another
language family. We concentrate on two West Slavic languages: Polish and Czech. To the best of
our knowledge, neither language has been investigated regarding the acoustic properties of the dif-
ferent focus types we examine.
To us, Czech and Polish are particularly interesting due to their word-stress properties. First,
both languages have fixed word stress: Polish on the penultimate syllable (Dogil, 1979, 1980;
Rubach & Booij, 1985; Kraska-Szlenk, 2003) and Czech on the initial syllable of words.6 This
6 Language and Speech 00(0)

makes them comparable to French and its fixed final stress, and thus makes it interesting to ques-
tion whether these three languages behave in a similar way when it comes to marking focus and
givenness and the contexts in which they mark them. They thus allow us to (further) test whether
there is a correlation between a lack of plasticity at the word and at the sentence level.
Using Vallduví’s terminology, when it comes to encoding information status Czech and Polish have
both been described as [- plastic] (or "free word-order" or "discourse configurational"), that is, they
have been described as languages that express information status through manipulations of the word
order rather than the prosody (Czech: Kučerová, 2007, 2012, Polish: Eschenberg, 2007 and references
therein). In both languages, prosody has also been claimed to play a role in the expression of informa-
tion structure. First, in both languages, focus is associated with prosodic prominence. Dogil (1980) and
Dogil and Williams (1999) argue that narrow focus in Polish is associated with “a relabeling of the
prosodic structure,” where metrical prominence is assigned to the focused item and its main acoustic
correlate is a F0 peak (“… the highest F0 together with a sharp F0 slope,” p. 286.)7 More recently,
Eschenberg (2007) argued that F0 is manipulated and that, in Polish, focus is made prominent by
means of a pitch accent. Both studies, however, only involve a limited number of speakers and did not
try to statistically test whether their results were generalizable. In Czech too, it has long been claimed
that focus carries the highest level of prominence in the sentence (Daneš, 1957) but, to the best of our
knowledge, no systematic study of the realization of focus in NPs is available.
Little is known regarding the expression of givenness. We are not aware of any systematic
acoustic study of this information-structural notion in Polish. Based on grammaticality judgments,
Šimík and Wierzba (2015) recently argued that in the case of Czech, manipulations of word order
are prosodically motivated by the need for given items to avoid being located in the position where
sentence main stress is allocated (in clause-final position). The results of Šimík and Wierzba (2017)
further support this approach for Czech as well as for Polish and Slovak.
The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we want to establish what happens in Polish and
Czech when the word order cannot be manipulated. This is the case in the NPs we examine,
which can only display the adjective–noun word order. They constitute an ideal testing ground
to determine whether Czech and Polish can display a prominence shift under focus and whether
discourse-given items are necessarily prosodically reduced. If stress flexibility at the word
level is correlated with flexibility at the sentence level, it may be expected that Polish and
Czech behave like French rather than English. Second, we want to determine whether context
plays a role in focus marking. Again, if the nature of stress matters, it is expected that with their
fixed word stress, Polish and Czech mark focus in the same contexts as French. Focus under
parallelism should thus not be marked.
Our results suggest that a lack of flexibility in prominence at the word level is not necessarily
correlated with a lack of flexibility at the sentence level, as both Czech and Polish display a promi-
nence shift under focus and deaccentuation of given items. They thus behave like English rather
than French. Our results also suggest that the nature of stress is unrelated to the contexts in which
focus is marked, as Polish and Czech, just like English, systematically mark focus and givenness,
even in focus under parallelism.

2  Methodology
2.1 Material and participants
To address how and in which contexts Polish and Czech mark focus, and to make our results com-
parable with those already available for French and English, we conducted two elicitation tasks
following a design utilized by vander Klok et al. (in press). We only looked at adjective–noun
Hamlaoui et al. 7

sequences and we added two conditions of our own, that is, focus as an answer to a wh-question
and a coordinated focus condition.
The experimental material consisted of 24 sets of items in each language (see online Appendix).
Each item set consisted of six different context types that varied in the way in which the focus
antecedent is introduced. Due to two errors in the construction of the stimuli, one item set had to
be discarded in each language. The target adjective–noun sequences were realized as objects of
Subject-Verb-Object sentences. We did not constrain ourselves to stimuli with sonorant segments
only, because we wanted to establish cues of focus that are robust across different segmental con-
texts. This methodology also seemed more ecologically valid, as both languages (particularly
Polish) are known for their abundance of voiceless consonants and clusters. The micro-prosodic
effects that different types of segments had on F0 measures (e.g., due to intrinsic pitch effects of
vowels and voiced vs. voiceless obstruents) will average out in the overall data because the seg-
mental context was controlled for within each item set.
Each trial consisted of a pseudo-dialogue displayed on a computer screen: a pre-recorded con-
text was presented aurally, and a scripted response was to be pronounced “as naturally as possible”
by our participants. Recordings were made using a head-mounted microphone. The participants
were subsequently asked to evaluate how natural their response was with respect to the proposed
context. Their ratings were recorded on a seven-point Likert-scale, with seven indicating that their
response was most natural and one the least natural.
Our main manipulation varied how the potential antecedent for focus marking is introduced into
the discourse. We had a total of six conditions in which the adjective–noun sequences were pre-
sented: new, coordinated, parallel, wh-question, contrast and correction. Sentences (8) to (13) illus-
trate one of our experimental items for Polish (see online Appendix for a listing of all items).
New (control)
(8) a. Jan sprzedaje meble z drewna.
  ‘Jan sells wooden furniture.’
  b. O tak, sprzedaje okrągłe i kwadratowe stoły.
  ‘Oh yes, he sells square tables.’

The context sentence in (8) does not make the constituents under investigation either given or
focused. This is our baseline for comparison for corrective, contrastive and information focus.
In the corrective focus condition in (9), the antecedent is instead provided in a previous claim
that the follow-up target sentence corrects.
Corrective focus

(9) a. Słyszałam, że Jan sprzedaje okrągłe stoły.

  ‘I heard that Jan sells round tables.’
  b. Nie, on sprzedaje kwadratowe stoły.
  ‘No, he sells square tables.’
In (10), the context, it is properly contained in a sentence that additionally contains non-over-
lapping and hence non-given material.
Contrastive focus

(10) a. Tomek sprzedaje okrągłe stoły.

  ‘Tomek sells round tables.’
  b. Naprawdę? Jan sprzedaje kwadratowe stoły.
  ‘Really? Jan sells square tables.’
8 Language and Speech 00(0)

The antecedent could also be provided in a previous constituent of the same sentence, as is the
case in the parallel focus condition in (11). If Polish and Czech behave like French, we expect
focus not to be marked in this condition.
Parallel focus

(11) a. Słyszałam, że Jan sprzedaje meble z drewna.

  ‘I heard that Jan sells wooden furniture.’
  b. Tak, sprzedaje okrągłe stoły i kwadratowe stoły.
  ‘Yes, he sells round tables and square tables.’
In addition to the four conditions examined by vander Klok et al. (in press), we included two
additional conditions: information focus in (12), that is, focus as an answer to a wh-question, and
coordinated focus in (13).
Information focus

(12) a. Jakie stoły sprzedaje Jan?

  ‘Which tables does Jan sell?’
  b. On sprzedaje kwadratowe stoły.
  ‘He sells square tables.’
The context question in (12) makes all material present in the answer given, except the one cor-
responding to the wh-word. If Polish patterns are like English, we expect the focused adjective to
receive a prosodic boost (reflected in higher pitch, intensity and duration) and furthermore a reduc-
tion of the given material following the focused word (Eady et al., 1986; Breen et al., 2010).
Coordinated (control)
(13) a. Słyszałam, że Jan sprzedaje meble z drewna.
  ‘I heard that Jan sells wooden furniture.’
  b. Tak, sprzedaje okrągłe i kwadratowe stoły.
  ‘Yes, he sells round and square tables.’

The motivation for adding the coordinated condition with the ellipsis of the first noun is two-
fold. First, we were interested in whether the adjective receives a prosodic boost when it is focused
even in cases where the following noun is not given, and also whether the following noun, which
is discourse-new, would be prosodically reduced in these cases (Katz & Selkirk, 2011). The second
motivation was the intuition that the structure in (13) is more natural than the somewhat awkward
case of parallelism (11), where the noun is repeated, and we aimed to assess whether the structure
might be unacceptable to a point where interpreting the prosodic results would be futile.
In total, 63 participants, mostly university students, took part in the two experiments: 31 Polish
native speakers (age 19–44, nine male) and 32 Czech native speakers (age 18–33, 12 male). The
recordings took place in soundproof labs in Berlin, Szczecin and Prague. All Polish and Czech
speakers were monolingual and spoke the standard variety of their language.
Each participant saw every condition from every item. Randomization was made use of so that
by taking only the first block of trials of all participants we could analyze the experiment as a
Latin-square design, with everyone only seeing one condition from each item.

2.2 Data analysis

We created a word-by-word and syllable-by-syllable alignment of the data using the Prosodylab-
Aligner (Gorman, Howell & Wagner, 2011) trained on our own experimental data. Measurements
of the relevant constituents were obtained using PRAAT scripts (Boersma & Weenink, 2015) and
Hamlaoui et al. 9

were hand-checked. Crucial here were measures of maximal fundamental frequency (F0), maxi-
mum intensity and duration for both the adjective and the following noun. Because we were inter-
ested in the differences of those parameters between the adjective and noun (i.e., prominence shift),
we subtracted the max F0 of the noun from the max F0 of the preceding adjective within a given
sentence. The same procedure was applied for maximum intensity and duration. In doing so, we
obtained relative measures for each focus type. For statistical calculations we used the difference
in semitones, the difference in log duration, and the difference in decibels (dB) respectively.
We analyzed the data in R (R Core Team, 2013) using linear mixed effect models with the help
of lme4 (Bates, Mächler, Bolker & Walker, 2015). The lme models were employed for studying the
influence of Focus Type [New, Coordinated, Parallelism, Wh, Contrast, Correction], Gender [male,
female] as well as their interaction on (a) relative frequency, (b) relative intensity, and (c) relative
duration. We used treatment coding for the factors (Focus Type, Gender).
To minimize the Type I error we fitted maximal models with random intercepts, and slopes for
items and participants (Barr, Levy, Scheepers, & Tily, 2013), then estimated p values with the
Satterthwaite approximation with the help of lmerTest (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen,
2013). The maximized models were tested against less complex models by means of likelihood
ratio tests by using the ANOVA function in R and the best fit model was taken as the final model.
Finally, because the factor Focus Type consisted of six levels and the linearity between the levels
was high, we recoded the levels to individual variables and took out the correlation between the
random effects. The linear mixed effects models (LME) outputs for all models are provided in the
online Appendix (Tables 2.1–2.6.)
The statistical calculations were performed for the two languages separately as the following
reports show. However, because we were also interested in the interaction between language and
focus type, the data from both languages were also considered together and Language (Czech,
Polish) was added as a factor. Our results are based on 3531 observations in Polish and 3743 in
Czech.

3  Results
In this section we present how speakers of both languages employed pitch, intensity and duration
in the production of different types of foci and control conditions. We first present and discuss raw
data, then we show statistical results based on relative values. Before we turn to that, let us briefly
examine naturalness ratings.

3.1 Rating of naturalness

We first checked whether our conditions differed in naturalness. For Polish, the ratings suggest that
all conditions were considered acceptable with most at the positive end of the scale. As expected,
the parallelism condition was rated as less natural, especially in Polish. However, given that it was
not strongly rejected, we concluded that the prosodic data from this condition would still be
meaningful.
Regarding Czech, all conditions were accepted, almost equally, with correction and wh condi-
tion showing the greatest acceptability. The results are shown in Figure 1. Three speakers were
excluded from consideration as they seemed not to have responded to the task. In the box plots in
Figure 1, the boxes correspond to the 25th to 75th percentile range, black lines represent medians,
and whiskers correspond to ±1.5 inter-quartile range; data above or below this range are outliers
and represented as points in the graph.
10 Language and Speech 00(0)

Figure 1.  Rating of naturalness of all conditions for Czech and Polish.

3.2 F0
In English, when prominence is shifted to the adjective, the focused adjective typically carries a
high pitch accent and the noun is realized with reduced pitch. It is by no means clear if this is the
case in all languages that mark focus prosodically. For example, Akan has been argued to lower
pitch under focus (Kügler & Genzel, 2012). However, our F0 results reveal that both Czech and
Polish are similar to English in this regard.
F0 is both boosted in focused adjectives and reduced in discourse-given nouns. This is illus-
trated in Figure 2, which displays time-normalized F0 contours for one of our items, with the target
words “murowane domy” (brick houses).8 The six conditions are represented.
In Figure 2, the noun phrase in our first control condition (New) shows a general declining pat-
tern. Primary phrasal stress is on the penultimate syllable of the noun (“do”). This is visible through
a peak on this syllable, which suspends F0 declination and creates a plateau at the juncture between
the two words. The syllable that follows “do,” that is, the last syllable of the noun, does not carry
stress, and this is visible through a sharp fall (followed by a slight rising of F0, which is also
observable in three other conditions).
A comparable contour is observed in our second control condition (Coordinated), although the
noun seems slightly reduced (F0 falls between the adjective and noun rather than forming a pla-
teau.) In all four focus conditions (including Parallel), the shift in prominence between adjective
and noun is clear. A sharp fall follows the penultimate (stressed) syllable of the focused adjective
and the F0 register of the discourse-given noun is compressed. Note, however, that the noun is not
exactly deaccented, in the sense that givenness would lower its accent to a minimum and make it
realized with a flat contour (as described for instance in Féry & Ishihara, 2009, for postnuclear
given material in German). Rather the pitch excursion on that syllable suggests a tonal target is still
present. The accent is simply reduced (lower F0, narrower pitch range) compared to our control
conditions. This is reminiscent of what is reported in Féry and Kugler (2008) and Kügler and Féry
(2017) for German, and Wagner and McAuliffe (2017) for English.
Conversely, the primary stressed syllable (“wa”) of the adjective is realized with a higher F0.
This is most visible in the Correction and Contrast conditions. The Wh condition shows a similar
shape, but on a generally slightly lower register than Contrast and Correction conditions. As to
the Parallel condition, it seems to show a drop in F0 following its second (unstressed) syllable,
which could suggest that the initial syllable of the adjective carries primary stress in this particu-
lar focus condition.9
Hamlaoui et al. 11

Figure 2.  Time-normalized F0 contours for item 16 in Polish (averaged across all speakers).

Similar overall patterns are observed in Czech and illustrated in Figure 3 with target words
“modré balonky” (blue balloons) for all six conditions. The four focus conditions, including the
Parallel focus, show a higher F0 on the initial syllable of the (focused) adjective and a drop in F0
that starts as soon as the following (unstressed) syllable of that word. Although the initial syllable
of the noun displays a peak that suggests it still carries stress, the noun is prosodically reduced and
realized with a lower F0 than in the control conditions.
The results for all items and both languages are illustrated in Figure 4. Note that tables in the
online Appendix provide mean and standard values as well as model outputs for all parameters
investigated.
A comparison of relative max F0 across different focus conditions, illustrated in Figure 5, shows
that in both languages there is a significant difference between the control conditions and all focus
types: the difference in max F0 between the adjective and the noun is larger in parallelism, wh,
contrast and correction conditions than in new and coordinated conditions (p < 0.001 for all com-
parisons in Polish and Czech, see Tables 3.1 and 3.2 in the online Appendix). In addition, in Polish,
the difference in max F0 was significantly larger in the coordinated condition than in the new
condition (p < 0.001). By contrast, in Czech there was no significant difference between these
conditions. The Polish pattern might be related to the distinction between focused, new and given
information drawn in Katz and Selkirk (2011) and unpredicted by standard focus theory. The two
conditions indeed differ in that the noun is part of the focus in the new condition, whereas it is not
in Coordinated without being given either, as in the other focus conditions. As the noun is
12 Language and Speech 00(0)

Figure 3.  Time-normalized F0 contours for item 24 in Czech (averaged across all speakers).

Figure 4.  Max F0 in adjectives and nouns in Czech and Polish across different focus conditions.

not present in the previous context (neither in the target nor in the context utterance), it can be
considered discourse-new. Further investigation of the data is necessary to establish the source of
this difference between the two languages.10
Hamlaoui et al. 13

Figure 5.  Relative max F0 in adjectives and nouns in Czech and Polish across different focus conditions.

When pooling the data across the two languages,11 it appears that Polish significantly differs
from Czech in the way it marks the focus types. Focused items are produced with a larger max F0
difference in Polish than in Czech (t = 1.93, p < 0.001). A significant interaction was also found
for interactions of wh- and corrective focus and language, suggesting difference in their production
in the two languages. These results are detailed in Table 3.3. in the online Appendix.

3.3 Intensity
Concerning intensity, we observed a pattern similar to that found for F0: in given nouns intensity
was reduced and, to some extent, it was boosted in focused adjectives. The conclusion applies to
both languages, as illustrated in Figure 6; see also Tables 1.3 and 1.4 in the online Appendix.
A comparison of relative intensity across different focus conditions, shown in Figure 7, reveals
that in both languages there is a significant difference between the control conditions and all focus
types. The difference in intensity between adjectives and nouns, that is, relative intensity, is signifi-
cantly larger in the latter. While in Czech Coordinated and New conditions did not significantly
differ, in Polish the difference in intensity between adjectives and nouns was significantly larger in
the Coordinated condition (p < 0.01) (see Table 3.4 in the online Appendix).12 Tables 2.3, 2.4, 3.4
and 3.5 in the online Appendix provide mean values, standard deviations and details of statistical
models for relative intensity obtained for both languages.
When comparing the languages it appears there is no significant difference in the production of
relative intensity between Polish and Czech (t = 0.043, not significant, n.s.). However, Polish signifi-
cantly differs from Czech in the way that intensity is produced in parallelism (t = −2.039, p < 0.05)
and wh items (t = −4.10, p < 0.05). The results are detailed in Table 3.6 in the online Appendix.

3.4 Duration
In terms of duration, the pattern is less clear than for F0 and intensity when we look at the raw data. If
information structure affects duration, we would expect focused adjectives to be longer than their
14 Language and Speech 00(0)

Figure 6.  Max intensity in adjectives and nouns in Czech and Polish across different focus conditions.

Figure 7.  Relative max intensity in adjectives and nouns in Czech and Polish across different focus
conditions.

non-focused counterpart and given nouns to be shorter than their non-given counterpart. This is what
has been observed in English, for instance, where Kochanski et al. (2005) find that prominence is
marked primarily by duration and intensity. This prosodic parameter has also been found to be used as
a cue in French, albeit only in the increased duration of focused items, and not in the reduced duration
of given (post-focal) ones (Jun & Fougeron, 2000; Dohen & Loevenbruck, 2004). When looking at
Table 1.5 and Table 1.6 (online Appendix), what we see is that Polish adjectives tend to be longer in
focus conditions than in the control conditions. The nouns, however, seem less systematically short-
ened or reduced when discourse-given. The same tendency appears for Czech speakers (see Figure 8).
Hamlaoui et al. 15

Figure 8.  Duration of adjectives and nouns in Czech and Polish across different focus conditions.

A comparison of relative duration, that is, the difference between log duration of the adjective
and log duration of the following noun, across different focus conditions reveals that duration is
nonetheless a reliable acoustic correlate of focus in both Polish and Czech; see Figure 9. In Polish
the difference between adjectives and nouns is larger in all focus conditions than in the control
conditions (p < 0.001 for all comparisons, except for coordinated focus condition, which was p <
0.05); see Figure 9 and Tables 2.6 and 3.8 in the online Appendix. As for Czech, the difference in
relative duration between control and focus conditions is also significant (p < 0.001 for all com-
parisons), but it remained not significant for coordinated versus new conditions; see Figure 9 and
Tables 2.4 and 3.7 in the online Appendix.
When comparing both languages it appears that Polish does not significantly differ from Czech
as far as relative duration is concerned (t  = −0.36, n.s.). It does differ, however, in the way the wh-
focus type affects duration (t  = −0.039, p < 0.01). This and other significant interactions are detailed
in Table 3.9. in the online Appendix.

3.5 Summary of the results

Our results show that in both Czech and Polish, prosody reliably encodes information status in
adjective–noun sequences, a syntactic domain in which word order cannot be manipulated to
express information structure. In both languages, items are more prominent under focus and
reduced when discourse-given, with F0 and intensity being the most reliable correlates of informa-
tion status. These results confirm previous claims regarding the role of prosody in encoding infor-
mation status in these so-called “discourse-configurational” languages.
The fact that these languages with a fixed word stress both display prominence shift at the sen-
tence level, and thus behave like Germanic languages, casts doubt on the idea that the lack of flex-
ibility in sentence-level prominence observed in certain Romance languages, particularly French,
might be traced to word-level stress properties. Czech and Polish also fail to form a natural class
with French when it comes to the contexts in which focus is expressed, as they systematically
encode focus, even under parallelism.
16 Language and Speech 00(0)

Figure 9.  Relative duration in Czech and Polish across different focus conditions.

However, one point where Czech, Polish and French seem to meet is in the expression of con-
trast and correction. In corrective focus in particular, French speakers reliably shift prosodic promi-
nence to the focused constituent. This interaction between focus type and prosody across languages
is often attributed to different focus-subtypes having different grammatical prosodic and/or syntac-
tic repercussions, (extra stress, e.g., in Féry, 2013). It constitutes a prima facie problem for the
theory of focus in Rooth (1992), which does not distinguish focus types. However, vander Klok
et al. (in press) and Klassen et al. (2016) argue that these interactions can be accounted for if lan-
guages vary in the scope of focus operator ~.

4  Conclusions
The universality of the association between focus and prominence has often been questioned in
recent years, sometimes leaving one with the impression that it might, after all, only systematically
apply in Germanic languages. The present paper shows that West Slavic languages also display a
robust correspondence between focus and prominence, and systematically reduce given informa-
tion. Just as in Germanic languages, they mostly do so by means of F0 and intensity manipulations.
This provides further support to Šimík and Wierzba’s (2015, 2017) findings that prosodic promi-
nence plays an important role in speaker’s evaluation of the naturalness of responses in dialogues
in Czech (and Polish).
The finding that Polish and Czech show similar effects with respect to focus prominence as
Germanic languages and different ones compared to Romance languages has at least two theo-
retically important implications. The first is that in trying to explain the prosodic differences
between Germanic and Romance, authors have often argued that there might be a trade-off
between syntactic means of encoding focus and prosodic means of encoding focus (Vallduví,
1991; Lambrecht, 1994, i.a.). Given that Polish and Czech have a flexible word order, and yet
show similar effects of focus as in the comparatively rigid case of English, this suggests there is
no such straightforward relationship between how free or fixed word order is and whether focus
and givenness are prosodically marked. Variation in the prosodic realization of focus is not a
Hamlaoui et al. 17

function of word order options, rather it must be due to something else. One idea is that lan-
guages vary in the semantic types of focus they mark prosodically (Ladd 2008, i.a.), another is
that languages vary in the scope possibilities of the focus operator ~ (vander Klok et al., in press;
Klassen et al., 2016). Further study of the cross-linguistic variation of prosodic focus marking is
necessary to distinguish between possible accounts.
A second theoretical implication of our findings regards the relationship between word prosody
and sentence prosody. Romance languages differ from Germanic languages in that main word
stress always falls within the last three syllables of a word. One way to characterize a generaliza-
tion across Romance languages is that word stress invariably falls within the last foot. This is not
true of Germanic languages, where there can be minimal pairs that differ in whether the first or the
last foot of a word receives main word stress. This plasticity of word stress seems to correlate with
greater prosodic plasticity at the sentence level. Polish and Czech, however, show invariable word
stress (penult and initial respectively), and yet sentence prosody is plastic in Valludví’s sense. It
then seems that there is no deep connection between the word stress level and the sentence stress
level in terms of plasticity.

Funding
This research has been supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research Grant Number
01UG1411 to Fatima Hamlaoui and Marzena Zygis, and by funding through the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation to Michael Wagner.

Notes
  1. In Rooth’s implementation, the requirement for an antecedent is enforced by an unpronounced pronoun
that ~ takes as one of its arguments. See Schwarzschild (1999) for an alternative implementation where
the relation to the antecedent is established via entailment.
  2. We do not specify the focus structure in terms of the attachment site(s) of ~ and F here because the analy-
sis of these languages remains controversial. One possibility is that ~ simply cannot be embedded as in
(1b) (vander Klok et al., in press), another is that there is actually embedded focus marking even in (2b)
and (3b), but it is not prosodically realized.
  3. They also examine other syntactic configurations (e.g., complex sentences) but this is not central to the
present paper.
  4. Following, for instance, Krifka (2007) corrective and contrastive focus are distinguished. Together with
additive focus (marked for instance by the particle “too” in English), corrective focus can be considered
a subtype of contrastive focus.
  5. Cruttenden does not attempt to characterize what it is about certain dialogues that makes them more
or less prone to prominence shifts, but two of the dialogues in which French speakers did not reliably
shift prominence arguably involve parallelism, that is, an antecedent for focus marking within the same
utterance.
  6. Note that all the languages considered here display default final sentence stress (Daneš, 1957, p. 63 for
Czech; Dłuska, 1976, Dogil, 1980 for Polish).
  7. Additionally, Dogil (1980) claims that in words of four or more syllables, a shift of word level promi-
nence is operated under focus: the metrically strong initial syllable carries primary stress whereas the
penultimate syllable carries secondary stress. As discussed in detail in Hamlaoui, Żygis, Engelmann, and
Wagner (2015), we do not find evidence for this claim.
  8. Following Xu (1997), we used a triangular window with a width of 0.07 seconds to smooth the F0 values.
  9. However, this does not seem to be representative of our other items because, as reported in more detail in
Hamlaoui, Żygis, Engelmann, and Wagner (2015), the penultimate syllable in focused adjectives is sig-
nificantly more prominent than the initial syllable in all conditions except in the coordinated condition.
10. Note in passing that the interaction of focus type and gender is significant in Polish, indicating that
women produced a lower relative difference between different focus type and controlled conditions
18 Language and Speech 00(0)

than men (see Table 3.2 for Polish; Table 1.2 provides mean values and standard deviation of raw values
and Table 2.2 mean values and standard deviation of relative values. All Tables are found in the online
Appendix.) We do not attempt any speculations regarding the interpretation of this result.
11. For the purpose of this analysis, we fit a regression model to the data from Czech and Polish pooled
together and added the interaction language*focus type to the model. The reference levels were [new]
and [Czech].
12. We also found a significant interaction between male and female speakers in correction versus the new
condition but at this point it is unclear how we can interpret it.

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