(De-)accenting and discourse structure

Abstract

The research reported on in this paper is part of a larger study on sentence accent in (particularly)Dutch, in which a rather unconventional approach is followed. Instead of regarding accents chiefly as carriers of pragmatic information, the hypothesis is that it is not so much accent that carries information, but rather lack of accent in a position where the syntactic structure of the utterance ‘predicts’ one. The present paper discusses the question: given a definite NP that is a candidate for accent, in view of the syntactic structure, under what conditions is that NP left unaccented? The main conclusion is that de-accenting of definite NPs is determined by discourse grammar, which leads to the more general hypothesis that sentence accent in Dutch (and English) is essentially a matter of syntax: accenting is related to sentence syntax, de-accenting to discourse syntax.