PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The expression of focus in Georgian differs from the expression of focus in other intonational languages like English and German. The crucial prosodic device in Georgian is the division of the utterance in prosodic phrases, signaled by boundary tones. In contrast to German and English, pitch accents – if present at all in Georgian – do not constitute unambiguous cues for the focus structure, even though pitch register extension is a possible correlate of focus. However, it has been observed for other languages that a particular prosodic realization of noun phrase subconstituents may evoke an exhaustive interpretation, i.e., a reading in which the relevant alternatives in discourse are excluded. This phenomenon is well known from languages like English or German, which may signal focus through pitch accents, but is puzzling for a language like Georgian, which lacks this prosodic strategy. This article presents a small-scale production study on the prosodic reflexes of exhaustivity in Georgian. Our findings show that prosodic phrasing is the main correlate of exhaustivity, but that the element on which exhaustivity is coded may present phonetic features resembling pitch accent. These features are not associated with a single syllable, but rather affect the entire word.