Interpreting the Scope of Negation in Three Varieties of German – The Effect of Prosodic Cues

This paper presents two perception experiments on three German varieties investigating the effect of pause, intonation

contour and peak alignment on (1) the scope of negation and (2) the strength of phrasal breaks. Subjects

from Kiel, Vienna and Düsseldorf participated in both experiments which drew on the same set of stimuli. Results

show that the interpretation of prosodic cues is task-specific, with intonation contour being predominantly

used for scope disambiguation and pause being used for phrasing. This implies that the question of how

German listeners resolve scope ambiguities cannot simply be attributed to the presence or absence of a phrasal

break between the main and the subordinate clause. The interpretation of scope as wide vs. narrow rather depends

on a more general impression of ‘cohesion’ between the clauses as indicated by prosodic means.