Lexical Semantic Information and Pitch Accent in English

영어 어휘 의미 정보와 피치 액센트

In this paper, we examine if the lexical information of the verb and its noun object affects the pitch accent patterns of the verb phrase focus. Three types of verb-object combinations with different semantic weights are discussed: when the verbs have optional direct objects, when the objects have the greater semantic weight relative to verbs, and when the verbs and the objects have equal semantic weight. Argument-structure-based works note that the pitch accent location in a focused phrase is closely related to the argument structure and contextual information. For example, it has been argued that contextually new noun objects receive accent while given noun objects don't. Contrary to nouns, verbs can be accented or not in verb phrase focus regardless of whether they are given information or new information (Selkirk 1984, 1992). However, the production experiment in this paper shows that the accenting of verbs is not fully optional, but influenced by the lexical semantic information of the verbs. The accenting of noun objects with given information is possible and the deaccenting of new noun objects also occurs depending on the lexical information of the noun objects. The results demonstrate that in addition to argument structure and information by means of context sentences, the lexical semantic information of words influences the pitch accent location in focused phrase.