ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Deaccented Verb as an Element in the Utterance Information Structure

Jan Volín, Adléta Hanžlová

The chief objective of the present study is to investigate actual manifestation of the potential lexical stress in Czech verbs. Putatively, lexical stress is expected to materialize in all auto-semantic words of an utterance. However, due to contextual givenness and stress-clash rule effects, some of the words can be deaccented. To map the situation, continuous spoken texts rather than isolated sentences need to be examined. Narratives produced by 16 professional speakers were annotated in terms of manifest accent-groups. In the recordings, 3708 verbs were identified and sorted into 5 grammatical classes. These were first inspected in a binary fashion: the structural stress either materializes or not (i.e., the verb is deaccented). Further descriptors of the verb status in the accent-groups configurations were extracted in order to find out how often the produced forms can be explained with reference to the context and how often various other factors were in force. Complementary questions concerned accent placement on auxiliary and modal verbs. The results offer an insight into a rich pool of pragmatic relations of verbs with other constituents, and provide a quantitative base for further experiments in the field of the information structure of utterances.