The intonation of accessibility

A perception experiment investigated the appropriateness of a number of accent patterns in contexts in which a referring expression can be regarded as neither completely given (already active in the listener's consciousness at the time of utterance) nor completely new (inactive), but rather in between the two, i.e. accessible (semi-active). Results clearly show that, for the purposes of intonation, accessible information cannot be treated as a uniform category. In a number of cases, one particular type of pitch accent, H+L* (early peak accent), is significantly preferred over another accent type, H* (medial peak accent), as well as over deaccentuation. These cases comprise whole-part relations, where the referent constituted a part of an already mentioned whole, and the scenario condition, where the referent was predictable from the contextually given schema, or frame. The remaining types of accessible information were shown to be preferentially deaccented, with a second choice for H+L* rather than H*. These cases comprised relations such as converseness, part-whole (in that order only), synonymy, and hypernym–hyponym (in either order). These findings point to the intermediate status of H+L* for the signaling of information states.