Markedness Considerations in L2 Prosodic Focus and Givenness Marking

Abstract

The chapter presents a markedness scale of sentence prosody that allows formulating predictions concerning linguistic differences in language contact, based on the general assumption that marked features are prone to change. It builds on the markedness scale of sentence accent that has been proposed for foreign language acquisition by Rasier and Hiligsmann (Nouv cah linguist fr 28:41–66, 2007), but motivates a separation of pragmatic considerations of sentence prosody into prosodic focus and givenness marking. Furthermore, it is sketched out how the markedness scale can be combined with other prominence scales in order to allow more fine-grained predictions. The markedness scale provides a unified basis from which predictions concerning sentence prosody as it relates to focus and givenness marking in learner and L2 contact varieties can be derived. Contact varieties under consideration in this chapter are mainly ‘indigenized’ varieties of former colonial languages.