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A long-standing issue in intonational phonology is the function of pitch accents in languages such as English and German. A theory which has been adopted widely in the semantics literature (e.g., by Rooth, 1992), is that of Selkirk (1984, 1995). By this account, accent placement interfaces with syntactic structure in signalling pragmatic focus, i.e. the informational status of the discourse referent denoted by the word or larger constituent.
Two unresolved questions are, first, the status of the notion of "nuclear accent" (or conversely of prenuclear accents), and second, the role of pitch accent type. By Selkirk's (1984) account, there is no functional distinction between the focus-marking role of nuclear versus pre-nuclear accents. The laboratory phonology literature on stress-levels and -shift, however, suggests that prenuclear accents differ from nuclear ones. Beckman (1996) proposes that some prenuclear accents might play the purely prosodic role of satisfying rhythmic constraints against long stretches of tonally unspecified material before the late nuclear accent in a long broad focus constituent. Such a differentiation of prenuclear from nuclear accents also suggests a phonological differentiation between the broad focus interpretation and the double focus interpretation. The literature on interpretation of contrasting pitch accent type similarly suggests that the standard account of the phonological marking of focus mapping is overly simplistic. Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg (1990) suggest an interpretation of the downstepping contour that gives it a different focus interpretation from the broad focus one. It thus appears that the notion of prenuclear vs. nuclear accent is useful in describing the parsing of accentual prominences in terms of presuppositions and focal functions, and that differences in presuppositions can also be expressed by pitch accent type. However, none of these hypotheseshas been tested extensively against spontaneous unscripted speech. This is important because prior evidence suggests that these relationships are difficult to acquire. Jannedy (1996), in a study of the acquisition of standard patterns in 3-10 year olds and adults, suggests that all of them show "reaccenting".
An important consideration in the study of the accent to focus mapping, therefore, is to develop an account of such examples that currently stand as challenges to the standard theory.
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