Production and Perception from Perspective of Focus

This paper investigates the effect of semantic argument structure on the comprehension and production of sentences by observing the prosodic realizations of English secondary predications. Specifically, the goal of this study is to show how the theory of predication, argument structure, and focus semantically interact to account for similarities and differences between English resultative and depictive predications. To address this issue, production and comprehension tests were performed. In the fried focus domain (verb phrase), subjects were asked to utter and to comprehend ambiguous sentences in the context monologues. The experimental results were generally consistent with general linguistic analyses: In the resultative constructions, secondary subject NPs tend to be accented, as in other argument-head constructions, while in the depictive constructions, secondary predicates tend to have accents, as in other adjunct-head constructions.