It has been widely observed in the literature that not only learner varieties but also contact varieties differ in their prosody from the standard variety. The article aims at providing a unified account to the linguistic variation in prosodic focus marking found across learner and contact varieties of the same language, South African English. The notion of markedness allows singling out prosodic focus marking as a likely target of linguistic change given its crosslinguistic complexity in sentence accent systems.

Index Terms: sentence accent, markedness, focus, givenness