Parallelism, coherence, and contrastive accent

This paper discusses an experiment concerning the assignment of contrastive accents, i.e., accents used to indicate the presence of contrastive information. The experiment tested which of two existing approaches to the determination of contrastive information gives the most natural results. According to one approach the presence of ‘alternative items’ is the only condition for the assignment of contrastive accent; according to the other the presence of parallelism between sentences also is a condition. The experimental results indicate that the presence of alternative items combined with parallelism always triggers a preference for contrastive accent, whereas in the absence of parallelism, accent assignment seems to depend on the degree of coherence of the utterance.