Coreference, lexical givenness and prosody in German

• Information status in spoken German is analysed both at a referential and a lexical level.
• Each level separately has an incremental effect on the degree of prosodic prominence assigned to an item, the lexical level being predominant.
• The “newer” a referring expression the higher its degree of prominence.
• The relationship between prosody and information status is clearer in read than in spontaneous speech.
• Accent position is a more decisive prosodic marker of information status than accent type.

In this article we discuss some empirical results concerning the impact of different levels of information status (i.e. referents and words, respectively) on the prosodic realisation of referential expressions in annotated corpora of read and spontaneous speech. Both at the referential and at the lexical level not only given and new but also intermediate classes of givenness/novelty have to be distinguished. We provide a brief introduction to our two-dimensional RefLex annotation scheme and discuss its application to a number of examples from the theoretical literature which cannot be described satisfactorily by means of previous annotation schemes. From these examples we derive hypotheses on the relationship between information status and accent position as well as accent type. The hypotheses are generally confirmed for read speech showing a stepwise increase in prosodic prominence from given to new items, predominantly ordered according to the information status at the lexical level. The results of the relationship between prosody and information status are found to be less clear in spontaneous speech, probably due to the production of shorter intonation phrases reducing the variability of accentuation in marking different levels of givenness.