Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

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

Baumann, Stefan, Rathcke, Tamara V (2011) Interpreting the Scope of Negation in Three Varieties of German – The Effect of Prosodic Cues. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Phonetic Sciences. 1. pp. 296-299. ISBN 978-962-442-341-9. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:48064)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/i...

Abstract

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.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Proceeding)
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Tamara Rathcke
Date Deposited: 27 Apr 2015 16:22 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:19 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/48064 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.