Reaccentuation or deaccentuation: a comparative study of Italian and Dutch

This paper reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch NPs. Accent-patterns were obtained in a (semi-)spontaneous way via a simple dialogue-game with 8 Dutch speakers and 4 Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, and double contrast. It was found that the two languages both signal information status prosodically, but in a rather different way. In Dutch, accent distribution is the main discriminative factor: new and contrastive information are accented, while given information is not. Newness and contrastive accents were not intonationally different, yet a post-hoc test revealed that listeners could distinguish a contrastive intonation from a newness one, because contrastive accents generally were the sole accent in the phrase and always had the shape of a nuclear accent even in non-default positions. In Italian, distribution is not a significant factor, since within the elicited NPs both adjective and noun are always accented, irrespective of the status of the information. However, there is a gradient difference in that "given accents" are perceived as less prominent than the other two, while there is no overall perceptual difference between contrastive and newness accents.