Phonetic Prominence of Contrastive Focus in English across Multiple Types and its Semantic Implications

Despite the phonetic differences between contrastive and information focus recurrently found in many phonetic studies, formal semantics and phonology have used the same formal notation ‘F-marking’ for both focus types. In this paper, the phonetic prominence (pitch, duration, and intensity) of various types of contrastive focus is compared with that of information focus occurring in separate utterances. The types of contrastive focus are collected under semantic criteria, namely the presence of an assumed alternative question. The experimental results show that contrastive focus has significantly longer duration and greater intensity than information focus, though pitch was primarily affected by prosodic position (phrase initial vs. non-initial) rather than focus type. The results proffer a question whether and how contrastive vs. information foci could be formally distinguished, suggesting that the distinction could be made as early as at the semantic level.