The Prosody of Topic and Focus in Spontaneous English Dialogue

This paper addresses the putative prosodic contrast between topic and focus and the tonal phonology underlying such information structure phenomena. We show that while there are systematic correlations between intonation and information structure categories, these correlations are not as straightforward as is suggested in the literature. In particular we deny that there is any prosodic category as distinctive as a ‘topic accent’ as opposed to a ‘focus accent’ in English. We innovate in this study by basing our investigation on naturally occurring spontaneous speech instead of on constructed examples or on experimentally-induced speech.