A pitch accent for contrastive emphasis in Danish?

Conference item

This paper presents an exploratory study of a previously unde scribed tonal contour in Danish questions. We analyze pitch trajectory data collected for a different purpose using functional principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering, which converge to show that two distinct pitch patterns are used for cueing pragmatic focus in utterance medial position: the ‘ex pected’ tonal contour that is generally used to signal stress in Danish regardless of the presence of focus (low–high), and an entirely differently shaped contour (high–low), which we inter pret as cueing ‘extra’ contrastive emphasis. We are (somewhat controversially) proposing that the pattern may constitute a new pitch accent for contrastive emphasis in Danish, although we also call for more targeted research into the intonation of con trastive emphasis in contemporary standard Danish.

Authors: Pharao, N; Puggaard-Rode, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: ISCA
• Host title: Proceedings of the The Third International Conference on Tone and Intonation
• Pages: 79-83
• Publication date: 2025-10-29
• Acceptance date: 2025-09-02
• Event title: 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2025)
• Event location: Herrsching, Germany
• Event website: https://www.tai2025.org/
• Event start date: 2025-05-16
• Event end date: 2025-05-18
• DOI: 10.21437/tai.2025-17
• ISSN: 2958-1796
• Language: English
• Keywords: intonation; contrastive emphasis; Danish; contour clustering; functional data analysis