The communicative significance of primary and secondary accents

Many formal linguists hold that English pitch accent has a single function: marking focus. On the other hand, there is evidence from corpus work and from psycholinguistics that pitch accent is attracted to expressions which are unpredictable. We present a two-factor pragmatic account in which both focus and predictability contribute to the placement of accent in an English intonational phrase. On examples of so-called “second occurrence focus” and related phenomena, our account gives superior results to the one-factor accounts of Rooth and Büring and to Selkirk’s rival two-factor account.

► Unpredictable expressions, as well as focused ones, attract pitch accent in English.
► We present a formal model for the interaction between focus and predictability.
► This model gives superior predictions on second-occurrence focus.