INTONATIONAL VARIATIONS IN FOCUS MARKING IN THE ENGLISH SPOKEN BY NORTH-EAST ITALIAN SPEAKERS

This study analyses the prosodic variation of pitch accents in broad and narrow-contrastive focus conditions in sentence-initial position as produced in L2 English by North-East Italian speakers, and compares them with similar productions in native Italian and native English. Our aim is to understand how the phonetic properties of accent (alignment, pitch scaling, duration) are modulated to mark differences in focus in the two native languages, and to compare the use of these properties in the productions in non-native English by Italian speakers. Preliminary results show that the most remarkable difference between native Italian and native English is in the use of the pitch height: native Italian speakers use lower pitch range and pitch span in contrastive focus, while English speakers do not. Italian speakers producing English show a strong influence of the native system and a systematic lowering of peaks in initial accents of contrastive focus sentences.