Our paper presents an initial investigation into the acoustic form and function of emphatic reduplication in German. We found that emphatic reduplications are used to attract attention in order to prepare listeners for important information. Readspeech data elicited on this basis showed that the emphatic reduplications of grade particles and verbal imperatives both start with a prosodic 'ritardando', but differ subsequently in the overall intonation patterns and their association with either decreasing or increasing stress and accent levels.
Index Terms: emphasis, reduplication, prosody, German.