Anarchy in the NP. When new nouns get deaccented and given nouns don’t

•Nominal deaccentuation requires neither givenness of N nor overt alternatives.•Nominal deaccentuation requires an alternative entity currently under discussion.•If given modified nouns are accented, their antecedent cannot be under discussion.•Two referring expressions cannot be contrastive and coreferential at the same time.•Sometimes, nominal deaccentuation is due to rhythm and has no focus interpretation.

We investigate a semantic–pragmatic hypothesis (relative givenness, Wagner, 2006) on an annotated corpus of German speech data. We show that nominal deaccentuation in an [A N] (adjective–noun) combination neither requires the givenness of N nor the availability of a different [A′ N] sequence in the overt discourse context but results from the fact that a referentially distinct alternative is either explicitly or implicitly under discussion. If no such alternative is under discussion, given nouns typically receive main prominence.