Chapter published in:
Crossroads Semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar
Edited by Hilke Reckman, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Rint Sybesma
[Not in series 210] 2017
► pp. 155–176

Chapter 10
Prosody of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in Dutch and German

| University of Pannonia, Hungary | Leiden University, The Netherlands
| Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Restrictive and appositive relative clauses differ in their meaning and structure. The first restrict the class to which the antecedent refers, whereas the latter denote additional information on the antecedent. In terms of structure, this difference concerns the relation between antecedent and relative clause, which is either narrow (restrictives) or loose (appositives). How these relations are encoded in prosody is the topic of investigation. Although there is considerable agreement on what prosodic cues distinguish restrictives and appositives across languages, claims mainly come from prescriptive literature. The current study investigates the structure-prosody interface experimentally by means of perception tests for Dutch and German. Results indicate that these languages differ in how prosody signals structural cohesion or breaking.

Keywords: restrictive, appositive, relative clause, structure-prosody interface, Dutch, German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Structure-prosody
    • 1.2Prosody of RRC and ARC
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Stimuli
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Statistical analysis
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.210.10van
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