On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational
correlates of information structure in a free word order language,
Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or
givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g.
pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different
languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992;
Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation
languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday,
1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information
structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss,
1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free
word order language might function like pitch accent in an
intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on
perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and
givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the
experiments was to establish whether information structure has
tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information
structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence
intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian
listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a
change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed
congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark
sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production
experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference
between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena
drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” –
“No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given
information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by
focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the
experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on
sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and
givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the
pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be
overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the
functions of pitch accent.